ABSTRACT
The destruction of the Berlin Wall presents a cautionary tale for those interested in how layered intricacies of cultural memory can fall victim to the complexities of political, bureaucratic and corporate expediency. As a manifestation of political failure, the Wall was an undertaking whose end was implicit―if not predictable― from its inception. When that end came, however, the failure to preserve its history within its urban context denied to spatial and architectural designers an opportunity to contribute to the construction of meaning in public life in unified Berlin. Removing the Wall, though an understandable response to the euphoria of the political moment, reduced the tangible and spatial markers for contemporary reflection on recent history. It also limited the role played by the built environment in the transmission of meaning to future generations, who may arrive at denuded sites formerly occupied by the Wall uninformed and leave unenlightened. Without a city-wide, multidimensional plan to identify, preserve and interpret sites of cultural memory, developers continue to erase traces of the past even as their projects’ superficial acknowledgements of these add to their cachet and to the profits they yield.
