TEMPELHOF

This project explores the potentials of the former site of the decommissioned inner-city airport Berlin Tempelhof as an “Urban Object”. Expanding on O.M. Ungers’ concept of the “Grossform,” the conflicted history of the site between Nazi megalomania, infrastructural threshold, and cold war symbol, serves as a welcome testing ground for the neutrality and adaptability of ‘form as background’ as posited by Ungers. The stable form of the object is here positioned on an urban scale as an organizing device and container for a variety of relationships between programs, occupancy and local morphologies. The Form-Object supersedes functional, stylistic, and ideological claims on its nature and becomes pure architecture in its own right.