I made these window paintings for a project for my Visual Culture project.
Berlin is a city where variations, contrasts, and ruptures manifest everywhere in visual ways. The fleets of cranes sticking out from the horizon wherever you look signal that this place is a work in progress with a fragmented history. The architecture tells a story of a city that has been reinvented and repurposed time and time again.
This series of small paintings depicting one standard feature of the urban landscape documents this variation. By compiling a series of window paintings referenced from all over the city, I have created a small microcosm of the kind of color- and style-mish-mash that Berlin so often exemplifies: an abandoned Mietskaserne stands next to a refurbished Plattenbau, a graffiti-covered ruin abuts a 1980s housing project, a sleek and shiny modern contemporary glass façade contrasts the flourishes of a Jugendstil one. These were the fascinating juxtapositions I hoped to explore with my project. The window is about the most standard architectural element you can get: pretty much every building has windows, and they appear with incredible variation. Thus, architectural idiosyncrasies are clearly manifested in the window form.
To this aim, I included all kinds of windows in my project; I chose both famously unusual windows like those in the Liebeskind museum, le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, or the iconic yellow 1980s apartments that loom over Kottbusser Tor, as well as nondescript windows like those that overlook the wide residential streets of Prenzlauer Berg.
Predictably, this project led me to new discoveries. For example, I began to notice links between the old and new and was further confronted by the difficult task of discerning what is actually new and what is actually old in Berlin’s landscape. I found myself looking up and around more attentively, on the lookout for interesting windows to draw.
Together, these small drawings evoke in me a visceral feeling that is Berlin—all the famous buildings I was so eager to visit in person before I arrived, and the everyday charm of the buildings I pass on my way home from school every day—visual souvenirs of this place I've learned to call home.
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