The Engelbecken (Basin of Angels) used to be an ornamental water pond that was part of a canal system running through the Luisenstadt, a 19th Century city extension of Berlin. In the early 20th Century the water was drained for reasons of hygiene. During World War II, the church of St. Michael standing across from the basin was heavily damaged, leaving only its portal and main cupola intact. And during the Cold War, the site was located in the “death strip” that was running along the Berlin Wall.

The project proposes the construction of a new nave for St. Michael within the Engelbecken. It reuses the church’s historic portal as entry, but in the opposite direction. The former basin becomes a sunken plaza with additional buildings for the parish, such as a bell tower, chapel, soup kitchen, and kindergarten. The shape and arrangement of these structures is inspired by early urban plans of the Luisenstadt. The Prussian Queen Luise had a great interest in spiritual welfare, as is evident in the many anticipated church projects in the area. As scattered seeds of civic development, they had been planted imaginatively in the sandy soil. Most of them remained unbuilt. Today their memory speaks to the dispersed fabric that surrounds the site: tenement buildings, warehouses and prefabricated social housing slabs.

The working hypothesis for the project is based on Sigmund Freud’s idea of the city as “(…) a psychical entity with a similar long and copious past, (…) in which nothing that has once come to existence will have passed and all earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one” (Civilization and its Discontent, 1927). This psychoanalytical approach allows us to understand the memory of the city as that of a person. Destroyed buildings and unbuilt dreams are as relevant as physical remnants. Both joyful and sad histories form complex interactions that can be referenced across times and scales.

During the period in which the cross-shaped Luisenstadt was built, the square-shaped Pulvermühle, a gunpowder mill located at the opposite end of town, slowly disappeared. The emergence of Luise’s spiritual welfare coincided with the disintegration of a military manufacturing facility. This transition can be understood as the process of personal individualization that formed the psyche of the Engelbecken. The analogy is based on Erich Neumann’s allegorical use of the ancient tale Amor and Psyche, to describe the female individualization process (Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, 1956). The architectural design of the project gives corporeality to this urban individualization. It superimposes the “male” church building and the “female” basin to reconcile the gender specific symbolism of traditional city planning.

Category: Unbuilt
Location: Berlin
Year: 1999
Authorship: Georg Windeck