PreserveCast: Come along with us as we explore the broad world of preservation and the work being done to preserve, interpret, and save our past in a 21st century world. From aquaculture to historic foodways to forensic modeling, we're talking weekly with experts from across the globe. This is your host, Nick Redding. Welcome to Preservecast. Did you know that the Campaign for Historic Trades, which is powered by Preservation Maryland, is the sponsor of three registered apprenticeship programs? The campaign also hosts workshops across the nation, maybe even one in your backyard. Visit historictrades.org to learn more and find a way to learn a trade. This is Nick Ritting and you are once again listening to Preservecast. ⁓ I am so excited to introduce you to today's guest, but before we get there, I ⁓ want to remind people that are listening to Preservecast, if you've enjoyed this and you're one of the growing numbers who are enjoying this and streaming it, ⁓ I would love for you to ⁓ click like, to share it with your social networks if you've listened to an episode that you really enjoyed or this episode. ⁓ And also make sure you ⁓ rate and subscribe to the podcast on wherever you listen to this to where we're on all sorts of platforms. ⁓ We would definitely appreciate that. ⁓ Today we're going to be talking about something that I've been fascinated about and ⁓ I love digging into something that I know not as much about as I do some things ⁓ and this is certainly one of those ⁓ we're going to be talking with Dr. Tim Eltenhoff who is a senior scientist in the Department for Architectural Theory and History at the University of Innsbruck and we're going to be talking all about ⁓ a new book that he has published called Breathing Space, the Architecture of Pneumatic Beings. ⁓ And I think this is such an interesting ⁓ concept and such an interesting topic to dig into. But ⁓ Tim, before we dig into the book and we talk a little bit about that, let us know a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up and what would put you on the path to science and architecture? Well, ⁓ first of all, thanks for having me. And Nick, that's a great occasion. delighted that ⁓ you're interested and your audience might be interested in the conversation and the book. I grew up in the south of Germany, actually, so close to Lake Constance, which is a federal state called Baden-Württemberg, so somewhere between Bavaria and France, but literally right on the Swiss-German border. It's quite a fascinating place to grow up. I was actually born at the foot of a volcano. mean, needless to say. extinct volcano probably goes back some seven eight million years that's not really my topic but it has a fascinating history of course because there is i think it's the biggest ruin also in germany the biggest castle ruin that sits on top of that volcano was destroyed by the french around 1800 in the german-french war but it's a wonderful piece of landscape i shall say because it's really right on on on on lake constants it's ⁓ it's an undulating pre alpine region are you have this test of the swiss alps ⁓ during good weather conditions ⁓ must and most of my youth outside outdoors i think because of the proximity to that board also there was a certain openness ⁓ in the local residents and people there are lots of traffic ⁓ going back and forth i mean the kind of porosity usually get that border states and the dialect is quite fascinating because it's somewhat related to Swiss German, but then very specific at the same time. sometimes he would just cross a village and go to the next town and people understand each other, of course, but they are pretty idiosyncratic and distinct at the same time. yeah, that's, that's. Well, I've been smiling along, people are listening, they can't see that. I don't, I mean, I hate to say it, but why would you ever leave? It actually sounds like a ⁓ magical place. I mean, think we can all envision this in our head. I mean, this is like one of the most gorgeous regions in the world, right? I mean, it is a stunning place and also a lot of fresh air, right? Like it just sounds fresh. just the Alps and it just sounds fresh. So growing up the way that you did and where you did, ⁓ what did you decide you were going to go off to study? Yeah, that's a great question. We've pondering that often enough. mean, in particular, my mother and I, because it traces back quite some time and I don't have the recollection she has. apparently, I mean, the story goes that ⁓ at some point in high school, I was probably around 14 or 15, there was a mandatory internship that one had to carry out for a week. You could essentially choose whatever you want. ⁓ and apparently it's not that it cost quite some confusion among ⁓ my my fellow classmates because they were having a hard time finding out what they what they should do with apparently i must have been so determined that with the blink of an eye i said i'm spend a week in an architecture office at the age of fifteen did my internship there ⁓ without hesitation so i i have no i have no explanation why i was so determined but i do that apparently from early on I mean, it's not the beautiful story you read about famous architects, some else, where they grow up, you know, seeing the skyline of Manhattan and then that inspires them to become architects. I somewhat had that deep inside me and then it just came out and I think I never let go of this idea. mean, then six, seven years later, I enrolled at a university in Germany, at the Bauhaus University and studied architecture ⁓ and did that for seven years. And I mean, Between the mandatory internship and studying architecture were you inspired by the local architecture of southern Germany? Were you was was historic architecture of interest in sort of like historic building patterns or were you more? You know you talk about you went to Berlin were you more interested in a more modern architecture like what what what? kind of inspiration were you drawing during that period? Because I think that that the reason I ask is I'm genuinely curious, but I'm also curious about when we get into this conversation about breath and air and how buildings breathe and how people breathe in buildings, how that has impacted your understanding and your awareness of that. That's great question. I think it was probably less historic or traditional architecture. I'm not so sure there is much of that. in that particular region, something I've been mourning also for some time because you would easily find that if you cross the border to Western Austria or even say Northern Switzerland, I think there the idioms that you find in the language there also they resonate much more strongly with local vernacular architecture, whereas in this particular part of Germany I've always felt it's a bit of a mess, so there is not much of a... particular traditions or something i would rather critique them than that my outside thinking many ways it was probably more ⁓ contemporary if not radical ⁓ even avant-garde architecture so if you if you travel you know an hour and a half by train you reached the vietre design museum which is close to the french ⁓ swiss border close to basel and there you find out how to get served first commission in germany a famous fire station on the company's grounds. I think that kind of work, which I saw probably at the age of 19, 20-ish for the first time, think that reignited my desire to study architecture, much more so than any vernacular or historic architecture. reason... That's fascinating. And I'm glad I asked the question because, of course, in my head, I was imagining something quite different about where you grew up. But it's interesting that it didn't have... that level of vernacular architecture that might spring to your mind when you think of that part of Germany. ⁓ what was your first job in the field after that? Did you become a practicing architect? Were you working in a firm or did you stay in academia? No, actually I did work ⁓ in a firm. I think I was pretty exhausted by the time I graduated. I mean, I spent several years at vietnamese art schools there are two different ones i attended both and it was more or less you know for european ⁓ conditions i would say someone elitist i mean you have to pass an entry exam and workshop for several days you had to produce a portfolio that they then evaluated so not many people were actually admitted to the school and pressure was high and the requirements, the workload was pretty high. So in many ways I think I felt somewhat exhausted by the time I graduated. then a first job was offered through my thesis advisor. She had a friend in Basel essentially and a small project. And I thought this was just a perfect condition for me, not too far from home, a somewhat small project. It didn't really work out the way I envisioned it after two or three weeks, ⁓ maybe a month, I dropped the gun and then went back to Vienna ⁓ and picked up freelance work there. So it wasn't really in any way strategic ⁓ as it was. I didn't pick it up. wasn't really passionate for working for one particular firm because I thought this was the most valuable and strategic decision. And if I just did that for two or three years, this would inevitably lead to the next step. there wasn't any plan like that. So essentially I was freelancing and what often happens and what many people mourn of course after graduation is that you do all this academic exploration, you design, do research and then essentially you may want to build also. But then you end up in firms and you practice and then you get stuck with design work. So you hardly ever get to the point of actually building something because there is so little projects that get built and then so many people ⁓ don't actually have the experience to undertake any such project so you often work in the early design schemes which is fun for some time and if you if you appreciate that of course for others ⁓ forever but at one point you just want to do something hands-on and i think i just i just did that for long enough for two or three years design work and competitions some of which you know and and it's somewhere and one one prices and others just ended nowhere and then at one point i appreciate that much of the experience but i also sense the certain ⁓ you know and dot of discussion that was a certain lacuna because it just to design work and design work and design work and it's exciting but you want to you want to carry carry on with what you what you what you've had and experience at the university and i think rather than trying to implement that in in the profession i just realized that i that i want to be back at university and and and getting back into this discussions and deep deep and and have arguments and exchange ideas and have the time and the luxury also to exchange ideas. And that finally got me to drop practice and apply for a PhD program and it worked out. And then I ended up at Yale. So the book that we're talking about today ⁓ is one that I think is fascinating. I told Tim before we pressed record, I had the chance to go overseas recently to Berlin and ⁓ was fascinated, just taken by and impressed by this idea of Lufthen, of opening up your space and sort of letting the fresh air come in, which seems sort of obvious once when you do it. It's not the most groundbreaking thing, but it really is valuable. And so often we don't do it. We trap our spaces. ⁓ The book is called Breathing Space, the Architecture of Pneumatic Beings. Tell me a little bit about how you got to writing this book. ⁓ What was the inspiration? Was there sort of a certain moment that you can point back to and you can say that was when I decided I really wanted to dig into this topic? I think a little I can try to pinpoint it because I think it's partly owing to the nature of the PhD program also in US academia because that doesn't pertain to Yale exclusively because what often happens is that you have mandatory classwork so there is two years preceding the actual phd of coursework ⁓ which at major universities of course ⁓ invites all kinds of investigations because essentially you can take seminars everywhere come but you know in complex departments in language departments in our history and philosophy and and have an incredible exposure to ⁓ plethora of ideas and different methods and approaches and and and i think just having the luxury of doing that and then coming back to architecture just changed my perspective on the field tremendously after these two or three years of practice and then I began to look really carefully into into modernist architecture and some authors also in particular that have been writing in the nineteen twenties European authors somewhat at the at the there was a transitional period say from from art history to architecture criticism which doesn't really didn't really exist. Before that, some of the early writers of architectural history, they were usually trained art historians. ⁓ And I began to look really carefully into some of these writings, in particular by a Swiss guy called Siegfried Gideon. He later taught at Harvard in the late 1930s. ⁓ And that was quite interesting. And he was one of the major proponents of modernist architecture in Europe and found his own. It's not very scholarly oftentimes. It's really, it's almost poetic and it's what others later described, authoritative criticism. So he really advocated for modern architecture and he found a language that was quite fascinating for me because he often used words like interpenetration. So I think that had much to do with certain ideas of transparency, the massive deployment of glass and in the architecture of the 1920s. And his idea to describe that, to come to terms with that, was using concepts like interpenetration. So essentially what he wanted to say is that inside and outside boundaries no longer exist. They begin to collapse. Inside and outside begins to blend into each other. There is no clear demarcation between an interior and an exterior of the building. And I think the primary idea, because he wrote this, of course as i said the huge deployment of glass but at the same time i found too many illusions very conspicuous need to many of those ones to add to air in motion to airflow and also to the very idea of breathing so at one point i began to think about this corporeal understanding that was often say transposed onto an understanding of the building so what i want to say is that often times critics and architectural historians in the ways in which they think about conceive of buildings, have corporeal ideas. So there is an understanding of the body that is then being inscribed almost in the building. And I think that often happens. German language has a particular term that is really often used, not so common in English, which is the so-called Baukörper. So it's literally the building body, if you translate it. And of course that carries all these notions of the physical body. into the buildings and there are many many metaphors of course in architectural discourse when people speak of circulation for instance nowadays has to do with access routes or escalators elevators lobby spaces corridors but it's essentially those spaces that are that are used for the motion of the movement of human beings but also of goods of all kinds of things and that's that's a bodily ⁓ analogy because circulation really has to do with blood flow ⁓ and oftentimes we have corporeal images that we begin to dump onto architecture and I think breathing I found so fascinating because that's precisely what the lungs from you do they they collapse this very distinction between inside and outside by this clearly an organ that is buried in our thoracic cage there is absolutely no doubt about that but the minute we are born ⁓ you we tap we plug ourselves into the atmosphere and we stay connected for as long as we live so the lung causes this topological problem because it's an internal organ but it stays connected to the outside world constantly every second you inhale and you exhale air from the natural world and if you stop doing that you can no longer live and I find that very fascinating and just becoming aware of that issue I began to dig deeper into some of these discussions around that time and there were so many illusions to breathing and that I at one point began to trace what I call this breathing culture. think there was a massive awareness, cultural awareness to these respiratory things around 1900 and people were highly aware of that. And I think what is important maybe to contextualize That is of course that this work, mean the book is now substantially revised. In many ways it's a new project but it's of course heavily informed by the dissertation, has the same title, but at the same time it caters to a broader audience, to more general readership, so it's no longer a PhD. But this work traces back to some 10 years now. think I really essentially started to work on the PhD in 2015. I think historic context really matters because it's clearly pre COVID-19 and around that time, think part of the argument and it still holds true today is of course that breathing is a background activity. We don't talk about this. Okay. We don't, we don't, just perform it, but, it's very, it's very interesting because breathing as a, as a physiological process is part of the autonomic nervous system. don't really control this actively because it's a vital function. It's absolutely, ⁓ quintessential for living beings. And if we stop it, we can't even do that voluntarily. can, you know, you can try to stop breathing, you might do that for a minute, but then you gasp for breath. So essentially, one can claim that breathing happens in the background, unless it comes under duress, unless something really happens. and you are threatened and then you become become aware of it and of course the covid nineteen pandemic has fundamentally ordered that could get condition because for almost two or three years we've been obsessively ⁓ concerned with all things respiratory and the media you know discussed on a daily basis case numbers and and we had all the incidents and family relatives reported so everyone was talking about breathing for two or three years so the press is the premise of this work, the way I set it up in 2015 was really fundamentally altered with the COVID-19 pandemic. how has that changed? But in some ways, I I think that's still a fair assessment. particularly when it comes to architecture, I think there's so much that happens with our buildings when it comes to breath and breathing and air that we either take for granted or we don't really take into account. buildings and I was just on another interview talking about something completely different and I was talking about, know, if you're in a commercial building right now, can you open the window? We were talking about sustainability, but you know, I don't think I've ever worked in a commercial office building myself personally where I could open the window, which is a really weird statement to make because ⁓ it seems like something you would want. ⁓ And it seems something so utterly unsustainable to not be able to bring some fresh air in. So, I mean, I guess maybe one of the questions I was going to ask, because I still do think that the premise holds, even though we know maybe perhaps a little bit more about how germs are spread. And if you're in a theater with a bunch of people who have COVID, you're probably going to get it. But I know the book explores this a little bit. How has our understanding of breath and air in buildings changed over time. mean, I know you're looking at this one period, but is it, are we kind of, is what's old new again in a sense? I mean, are we back to at least moving in the right direction about that sense of breath and breathing and air and the need for fresh air in buildings? Cause it seems like we went through a period where the goal was to seal ourselves off from everything. Yeah, absolutely. I think in many ways it still holds true. think there might be an undercurrent, know, something of a counter movement now in more avant-garde oriented practices that deal with sustainability because there is a certain recourse to primitive ideas, not in a condescending way, quite to the contrary. So I think passive ventilation techniques, ⁓ they come back to play. much of that has a history that traces several hundreds if not thousands of years passive cooling approaches in architecture so i think coming back to that idea and the one that you observed i think which which many of us share ⁓ is that in many of these buildings probably not the residential buildings we find ourselves in currently but in many of these corporate ⁓ spaces as you rightly point out to you are you're completely sealed and there is absolutely no way for you to engage the surroundings and the natural world and i think this condition is just only being exacerbated. mean, unless there are particular practices that set out to countervail that and to find projects and approaches that tap more into these older ideas, which are usually passive, trying to save energy and actually be more sustainable. think we have a linear, a gradual ⁓ seclusion from the atmosphere. think that's what these buildings ⁓ essentially do and i think that's also how i experienced my time in the in the yet school of architecture building because there's also one that happened you know refurbished and restored at one point was destroyed by a fire and then it fell into despair and then finally got restored again but now you find yourself in an architecture school one of the you know most amazing architecture school buildings in the world probably but you cannot open a single window that's exactly how you how you describe it and and And that kind of experience, which is a collective experience that many of us share, I think it speaks volumes to the way we, and that's, think, the idea and the hope of this book also to bring this ⁓ problem, this issue to bear, to just raise this as a question. I mean, is this our idea of living on this planet by just increasingly secluding us and sequestering us from the broader atmosphere, right? Do we want to live in these sealed containers and not take care of the environment any longer? Because I think that speaks volumes to that. mean, why would you seal yourself off from, I don't know, planetary conditions unless you care about those and unless they are really beneficial and pleasant? think, you know, it's baffling. Well, think and then, you know, that kind of brings us back to the book. I wanted to give people a sense and we'll put a link in the show notes so people can pick up the book. I mean, obviously we only have a short amount of time with Tim today, so we won't be able to talk about every last aspect of the book. We want to kind of give you a taste. ⁓ But, ⁓ you know, it's interesting that you let off sort of talking about this initial writer that you were reading who's sort of poetic, which I have to say you've picked up a little bit on. I love listening to you talk about this because you're very passionate about it. ⁓ But ⁓ you're talking about how he's writing at a time about modern architecture and sort of glass and sort of this idea that there is no boundary between the two. But I think for so many of us, we think of modern architecture and modernism as this moment when we begin to ourselves off. Where is the disconnect there and is that part of the story that you tell in that like was there a hope was there a desire for something that just didn't end up Materializing the way that that those initial visionaries had hoped Well, I think in many ways there might be you know, there might be parallel as is often the case in history and certain accounts of periods and Say our desire to periodize certain movements. I think there are many parallel accounts of what modern architecture really is and when it began and how you can characterize it, what are its qualities, we can do that in formal terms and material terms. think it's so codified and so much discussed also in terms of the avant-garde and in terms of new production technologies and serial production, ⁓ new materials, reinforced concrete and so on and so forth. And I think one way of describing it is of course that it might have created the onset of this gradual seclusion from the environment because essentially air conditioning began to take shape in the early 20th century. mean it was around 1900 and then I think probably first patented. mean I don't have the numbers already at hand but I think it was patented then around 1905 and 1906 for the first time and then... was constantly increasingly refined of course and that led essentially in the post-World War II era to sealed containers. think it was really first ⁓ window based operating boxes but then essentially that that inflected the entire building envelope and the idea that you want to control the interior environment. I think that's pretty much what it is. It's an understanding of architecture I would say as a as a technology to alter the atmosphere. I that's how we can conceive of architecture, whether modern or not, but that is what architecture does. And I think there is many, say natural paths, also natural healers of that era, late 19th century. I don't want to dwell on that too much, but the interesting idea is that they share these sentiments because they already argued that this is what our clothing that's what we put ourselves in in the tire and we are no longer exposed in the mood to the atmosphere which would be a natural circumstances i mean the most natural condition so and as much as our clothes. You know see less begin to see less off from the atmosphere so does architecture and i think that is one account of. Off off describing it and i think i'm trying to create this counter narrative where in fact beginning in the mid nineteenth century. there was this increased awareness for breathing, which also had to do with the... the once again, know, emergence of tuberculosis. mean, it wasn't a but conditions began to spread again had to do with the industrialization, of course, more people living in denser cities and so on and so forth. So I think that's my reading of modernist architecture. it's precisely, it's precisely not about sealing us off from the environment, but it's a certain understanding of buildings that are part of part of the broader atmosphere. I think everything that happened afterwards is then from 1900 onwards until the present. I think it's interesting ⁓ that you point out that you get into this in the book, sort of this, the historical basis for this, and then, you know, where early modern thought was on it, how air conditioning impacts this, give people a sense for where you take the book, and, and what Are you hopeful about the future? ⁓ Obviously, we want to encourage people to pick it up to read it because there's so much to kind of digest in there ⁓ and Obviously as I said before you're passionate about it and you have a great mastery of ⁓ understanding about this and which is so fascinating to me too because it's something like you say you just don't even think about sometimes and I love those sorts of stories and those topics to make us think about the world all around us ⁓ but ⁓ you know, from structures that are inflated themselves by air ⁓ to the future and this more sustainable approach. Are you hopeful and what are you hopeful for? I think it would be hopeful if there would be more ⁓ say an initial reflection or more broad-based awareness about the consequences of certain things that we undertake. mean there is many scholars working on air conditioning which is not really my primary subject or field but I think oftentimes we implement technology to ameliorate certain conditions and we completely forget that this very technology that we begin to implement causes new problems or exacerbates the situation or condition and I think air conditioning might be one of them because there is a vicious cycle. mean you for the better or worse we all want to have comfort in our lives. Our bodies ask for comfort and we want that for our friends and families and I get the very idea but then we implement air conditioning to adapt to the effects of of climate change and of course by by using this extra energy in order to install that we just excessive at the condition of climate change so ⁓ and at the same time i think sequestering us off from everyone else is just it's all fundamentally ethical and political at the same time because it just means that people have certain privileges will be able to live in certain buildings that have certain ⁓ features that other people don't have access to and it has to do with issues of health of course it has to do with ⁓ all kinds of privileges and i think just reflecting upon these issues and we're not so has you say i mean the very idea of letting fresh air in the such a convoluted ⁓ issue because what does that mean if i let fresh air into the house around lake constants or in new york city because we have so many local differences in air quality is enough cost during that in beijing or in manhattan is not the same as doing it somewhere in the swiss alps i think the very idea of taking fresh air has to be fundamentally debated or negotiated. So maybe in a city like Manhattan, you don't even want to have fresh air in your building because it's everything but fresh air. So maybe you want to fight all the pollutants and keep them at bay and don't let them seep into your building. But then who gets to do that? mean, it's usually people who have more. privileges and we have better building equipment and better technologies. But it always comes at the expense of everyone else because it exhausts energy. And I think we have to become aware of that. Yeah, I think what you're asking for, and we had another guest on, Erika Avrami, who is an architectural historian and historian of preservation. And she talks about second order preservation. She published a book called that people go back, listen to that episode and this whole idea of second order economics. where you think not just about what your decision is causing, but what decisions it causes down the road and what other impacts it has. And that you're so right about that with air and buildings and you could also be describing health, right? Where it's like you take one pill, but then that pill solves one problem, but it causes a new problem. So then you take another pill to solve the problem that the, mean, and it just cascades. It also makes me think even in with air and structures, It always strikes me as interesting as a historic preservationist and dealing in historic buildings that are kind of designed to at least breathe in different ways, maybe not just with windows, but to allow circulation of air ⁓ that in modern construction, you actually have, and you probably know the correct term for these things, but ⁓ air exchangers that are bringing fresh air into modern residential because they are so hermetically sealed. that you have to have that. And that always blows my mind because I'm like, we have become so good at sealing a building from an energy efficiency standpoint, that we actually have to have a machine that brings air inside of it. And that to me is like perfect. It's a perfect sort of microcosm of the situation that we're dealing with and why books like yours are so important to kind of illuminate this question. Give us the background on it and then let us think about where we want to take architecture. and our built environment as we move forward. Right. You know, and if it wouldn't be so sad, it would be hilarious and we would just burst into laughter. And I have this one anecdote also in the book that I'm just, I mean, it essentially corroborates what you just mentioned because there is a, I mean, it's really an anecdote and there was a publication in the German newspaper in 2016, actually in Berlin, a daily newspaper like the New York Times. and there was an article called when buildings have difficulty breathing and is essentially addressed what you just mentioned so there was a bunch of northern german schools by the time and they have been insulated with you know hyper efficient thermal insulation all in the name of energy efficiency of course because you want to be sustainable and environmentally friendly so for good cause you save the energy and that the building actually takes and then these buildings ended up being so how medically see that students are actually inside the classroom said not enough access to air to fresh air and then the carbon dioxide levels of roles so drastically and and the the breaks between classes are were so short that they couldn't ventilate the the interior spaces properly enough so that cost tremendous health issues and and some students almost fainted and because the buildings already have been insulated so well, they then had to install ventilation systems to provide fresh air. essentially you take all these measures to save energy, to implement another technology to ameliorate the causes that your first measures provoke. I mean, it's absurd. It's a vicious cycle. And it's really hilarious, but it's so sad at the same time, because I think we are just stifled by all these regulations. We just think that, you know, bringing, saving energy is always the fantastic cause. There are no doubts about that. But I think at one point, we should use our brains also and begin to wonder at what costs we undertake certain measures. And maybe we shouldn't always overdo it, because it just brings about new problems. And what are we going to save then in the end? The book Abundance by Ezra Klein has come up several times ⁓ in the past here in PreserveCast in thinking about the regulations and the regulatory environment we create and what that means for architecture and preservation. And there's a perfect example where we got so good at being sustainable that we made our students pass out. ⁓ And that's not really the end goal for anybody. And I think, as you say, it's sort of comical, but it really points back to A book like this is just really valuable at this moment for architecture students, for preservationists thinking about how you use the existing historic structure to teach ⁓ about what works, what doesn't work. But just to think about breath and that space and to take a deep breath and think about all of this is terribly important. And we've got a great book ⁓ produced and published and authored by Tim Eltenhoff. ⁓ And we've been talking about it all today here on preserve cast the book again is called breathing space the architecture of pneumatic beings And we have a link in the show notes encourage you to pick it up It's a fascinating read particularly as I said about something and Tim said this as well something that we do that we don't even think about But that is critically important and our buildings have a big impact on the way that all happens ⁓ Tim it's been such a pleasure to have you to hear from you to think about all of this Before we go, we always ask people if they have a favorite historic place or site, some place that they could go back to time and time again. Okay, that's a great question. I mean, I set out with this, you know, castle in ruins where I was born. I wouldn't name that. I think it's really Tempelhof ⁓ Field in Berlin. for various reasons because I think it's a magnetic site for me and it's I think the largest I mean I'm not so intrigued by these superlatives but I think it's the largest inner city open space in the world now it's probably I mean it's well over 300 hectares but it's such a convoluted history of course it's a former farmland and it has been used for centuries as a parade ground for the Prussian army at first and the Berlin garrison practically practiced there for many years and then from the 1920s onwards it's been transformed into an airport. Of course, has some Nazi legacy also in the 1930s because they undertook enormous reconstructions there and extended, expanded it and again more importance as you know by the Allied airlift then in 48, 49 when Allied supplied aircraft landed in West Berlin. and the bernin blockade and and i think it's so late that they have with history and that currently they they are stopped operation as an airport i think in two thousand and eight and after some ⁓ public debate of course because what does one do all of a sudden you have this a bit almost urban urban area i mean it was so much value for for all of ⁓ all kinds of real estate developers and of course everyone has a certain idea and expectation but they managed to secure it as a recreational park which is really what it is since 2010 so people just flock there you know you fly kites you bike you run on the the former runways everything is is transformed now there are meadows there is parkland you can barbecue in allocated areas there are dog areas i mean you can do whatever you want essentially so there is nothing and at the same time, the lousy for almost everything. And it's, I think it's one of the most historically convoluted sites and the former, I mean, the abandoned airport building, of course, is still there. The tower is still there. But I think that's one of the sites I like the most, just walking on these former runways for hours. Yeah, no, I love that. I love that there... These sites that are layered in history, I think, make them so fascinating because there's so many different aspects to kind of take in. And I think also, Tim, we found your next book. we'll be looking for a history of Altenhoff. ⁓ Dr. Altenhoff's history of Tempelhof Field ⁓ would be fantastic. So ⁓ we'll have you back when that one comes out. Looking forward. This has been a pleasure. We'll have the link in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining us today. We'll hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to Preservecast. 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