Attack of the Cyberzombies: Media, Reconstruction, and the Future of Germany’s Architectural Past (original) (raw)

Go to any blockbuster film this season, and you are sure to see some city in peril. Supervillains seem to prefer urban settings for their conquests, at least that is where the superheroes always seem to meet them for a final battle. As the ultimate public space, cities serve as the place where we ritually overcome aliens, comets, volcanoes, earthquakes, and many other real or imagined threats to civilization as we know it. And, as the films 28 Days Later, I am Legend, World War Z and countless video games have made clear, there is no place like a city for a zombie invasion, driven by whatever biohazard thrives on high concentrations of humans. Like the superheroes in the megaplex cinemas, contemporary architects have eagerly attacked the latest hypothetical challenge to the carefully engineered urban environment. Since 2010, the "Zombie Safe House Competition" has invited architects to design buildings that keep urban inhabitants safe from lurching, brain-hungry zombies intent on driving humanity to extinction ("N.A."). Good design is more than a silver bullet: we can avoid monsters and destruction altogether if we put our trust in well-conceived architecture. Architects and architectural critics not only keep us safe from biohazards, but also from other species of walking dead that might arise in the urban landscape. In his 2013 article in Der Spiegel titled "S.P.O.N.-Der Kritiker: Aufstand der Zombies," Georg Diez warns that zombies are in the process of taking over Berlin. There is no architectural protection from these zombies, however: the zombies themselves are architectural phenomena: Es ist ein wahrer Zombieaufstand, den Berlin da gerade erlebt. Untote Ideen kommen ans Licht, ewige Wiedergänger wie die leidige Traufhöhe, das sogenannte Ensemble, all die Kampfworte aus dem Kalten Krieg des Bauens, der ausgetragen wurde, nachdem die Mauer gefallen war und doch die Demokratie mal hätte gefragt werden können, was ihre Form ist, was ihre Schönheit ist, was sie will und verlangt, Offenheit vielleicht und Orte für alle und eine echte Bürgerlichkeit. Undead concepts such as "ensemble" and "uniform building height" are again rising from the ground in Berlin. And it is not just concepts that are returning from the dead, but entire historical buildings are rising out of the buried foundations of the past. In a 2014 post on the London Review of Books blog, critic Glen Newey looked at Berlin's plans to rebuild its city palace and sent out a grave alarm that "Berlin's Zombie Dawn" was upon us (Newey). Indeed, the world has watched the rise of the long-dead palace by means of webcams placed on surrounding buildings. First, the skeletal historical foundations were unearthed and studied, then the site was prepared, and finally the rising new shape of the TRANSIT, 10(2) (2016) 2 | Rob McFarland / Attack of the Cyberzombies Berlin City Palace, now called the Humboldtforum, rose to obscure the cathedral behind it, like a revenant feasting on the bodies of the living architecture around it.