LITTLE ZATEZALO: STORY ON LOBE BLOCK COMMUNITY IN WEDDING, BERLÍN

Abstract

This is a story of Berlin feeling its collective trauma, reprocessing the book Berlin Masques that John Hejduk wrote in 1981 – more than 40 years ago – to reconcile Berlin with the trauma of the Second World War. It is also my view on a brutalist building called ‘Lobe Block’ revealing its collective powers, allowing multiple behaviors to happen. In Hejduk’s manner, I will try to expand contextualizing my personal story, my roots from Yugoslavia in the ‘80s with Lobe Block today. I named this paper ‘Little Zatezalo’, to position myself in Berlin little by little as a female architect working with life-centered design, interested in care and multisensory approach; leaving space for Big Zatezalo’s story to arrive sometime by the end of my career. Also starting from the name chosen for the title Little Zatezalo, the paper tries to trace the thread that led from the Lobe Block building to a few personal buildings of the Brutalist period, to the reflections and ideas that produce it. The concepts that I borrow from Hejduk are ‘reciprocity’, ‘encounter’ and ‘time’; they are crucial notions for my objectives in architecture, my research about the psychology of space and environmental psychology through my practice, Sinestezia.