Walking around our college’s neighborhood, I find myself trying to trace a history through the different styles of architecture. Whether you stop to glance at the stoic church next to our administration building, or the newly constructed apartment buildings on the way to the supermarket slowly filling up, it is clear that Pankow holds a
TagAya Soika
Reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace: Stadtschloss Berlin, wherefore art thou?
Museum Island – the island of grand architecture, remarkable artworks and astonishing exhibits––stands incomplete before us today. It is impossible to miss it: the hole in the center of Berlin, surrounded by the city’s greatest and widely known museums; the place where the Berlin City Palace (Stadtschloss Berlin) once stood. 580 years after its cornerstone
Weekly museum visits
Each semester, ECLA of Bard offers the course Berlin: Experiment in Modernity. Just like the ECLA BA students have a mandatory core course each semester, this Berlin–themed class is the core component for the exchange students enrolled in the Bard in Berlin program. However, all ECLA students have the possibility to take it. Furthermore, students
Berlin Through the Eyes of… Aya Soika
As students from different parts of the world, we contemplate this ‘vividly-coloured’ city – Berlin – through the prism of our own upbringing. It has much to offer, indeed: if environmentally-aware – its green parks are a ‘snapshot’ of nature’s bliss; if interested in history – you’d never complain about the lack of a city
Revealing What’s Hidden
It was quickly decided by public decree that Leonardo would be given some beautiful work to paint, and Leonardo was thus commissioned to do the hall.” – Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists All over the world, art historians’ minds are divided concerning a recent discovery in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. The main hall, covered in
Visit to Jewish Museum of Berlin: New Experiences of Remembering
I had heard much of Daniel Liebeskind’s deconstructive architecture of Berlin’s Jewish Museum before visiting, so was therefore surprised by the presence of a romance-style building at the museum’s location.My visit was shared by a collective of ECLA students and guided by faculty art historian Professor Aya Soika and winter term guest professor Dr. Irit Dekel.
The Immeasurable Weight of the Void
On Friday 21 October at the Brücke Museum in Berlin, ECLA faculty member Aya Soika presented, in collaboration with the executors of his estate, her catalogue of and commentary upon the work of Max Pechstein. The results were no light production. Weighing in at 8.4 kilograms, with 1188 pages and 1340 illustrations, the labour-intensive project
Annual Conference: Whose Is That Wall?
The very first event of the Annual Conference 2009 materialized with the support of ECLA art history faculty Aya Soika and addressed one of the many features of Berlin that I find particularly fascinating –the ubiquitous street art. I became a discoverer of street art when I saw that familiar cities ‘back home’ were no longer