The most beautiful aspect of Julius Posener's legacy without a doubt lies in his language.
Even though trained as an architect Posener changed the face of Berlin without constructing a
single building. Instead he used his writing to save buildings from demolition. In nine
histories of individual buildings Katrin Voermanek traces the footsteps of Posener an
architectural historian critic and activist who died in 1996. The book sheds light onto how
Posener advanced his fight to preserve architectural heritage and how he articulated his
criticism of new buildings: sometimes impulsively sometimes strategically always grounded in
a profound erudition with humor and a gentle eloquence that remains unparalleled today. The
short accounts - which include the Schaubühne the Künstlerhaus Bethanien the Babylon movie
theater and two villas by Hermann Muthesius among others - bring to life Berlin's
architectural zeitgeist between the 1960s and 1990s and demonstrate both the necessity and
effectiveness of committed architectural criticism.
