Ch ap ter Fiv e In t er i m Use at a For m er Death Str i p? Art, Politics, a n d Urba n ism at Sk ul ptur e npa rk Berlin _Z en t rum

Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic facades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine. Although these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first 15 years of Berlin’s post- unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center might replace this former GDR parliamentary building. Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Kobberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms that led down into those sites. Their artistic excavation- installation, Turn It One More Time (2006–2008), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the division. Now, rather than leading upwards, the excavations led downwards and offered a new view into the history of a place.” Kobberling and Kaltwasser also observed how the “view” of the city from their platforms encouraged visitors to encounter the urban natural environment. The artists listed on a large billboard at the site the diverse array of plants in the overgrown fields they excavated according to their biological species. For the artists,