Stadtbild HRO

The heritage preservation law of 1975 attached particular importance to monuments, which sought to actualise the GDR as its own sovereign nation through constructed canonical architectural history. This law used party testimonies in a process of designating recent buildings under new preservation orders. Younger technical monuments like the Berlin TV Tower (1969) were on the register alongside architecture from the immediate post-war period. In an unprecedented move, buildings from the 1970s were registered only a few years after their completion. This practice culminated in the governing Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) initiated publication ‘Cultural Monuments of GDR History’ in the late 1980s—a project that remains unfinished. In late-2014 architectural historian Simone Bogner located the manuscript in an archive just outside of Berlin. The manuscript ‘Cultural Monuments of GDR History’ was scheduled to be published in 1989 — but never was — owing to the turbulent political events that year. The book presents 360 architectural objects connected to GDR history with accompanying texts by eighty different authors, incorporating sites of artistic, industrial, scientific, technical and political importance.. Having previously worked with Simone Bogner in 2012 on an exhibition describing architectural methods of documentation, I was invited to participate in the project to re-photograph the former monument sites across eastern Germany (Knight & Bogner 2012). Together we have been photographing the described sites as they remain in the present-day, whether demolished, transformed, replaced, or relocated