Peter Tokofsky of the Getty Museum is a native of Los Angeles, which mystified his fellow Zócalo panelist, Wolfram Putz. “He was saying you can’t find a real Angeleno in Los Angeles,” Tokofsky joked. “And I said everyone I grew up with was one.” Read more about Tokofsky below.
Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. I was listening to Haydn today because I went with students to a concentration camp and I needed to find a peaceful space afterward.
Niklas Maak, arts editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German daily newspaper, was born in Hamburg. Now, he’s well aware of the best of Berlin’s “culture of misuse,” as he calls it, a culture he also sees in Los Angeles, where car dealerships can be transformed to galleries. “Take Berlin clubs on the 18th floors of GDR office buildings, where you find the most interesting clubs,” he said during the panel. “You can see the sunrise in the morning if you stay up all night.”
Greg Hise, an urban historian at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, visited Berlin for the first time to speak at Zócalo’s panel. “You lecture a city, but it’s very different than actually seeing a city,” Hise, a native New Yorker, said. “There are of course parts that don’t appear in books.”
Wolfram Putz, a founding partner of GRAFT Architects, has offices in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Beijing, but he has no favorites among them. “It’s not an either/or question,” he said. “You should organize your life with as few either/or questions as you can.” He added, “Except in relationships, of course.”
Roger Sherman of Roger Sherman Architecture & Urban Design hadn’t been to Berlin for 25 years, until Zócalo’s panel at the Aedes Gallery there. He remembered traveling to East Germany on the subway. “The Stasi would come in between stops on the train,” he said. “You were nervous. You had all the legal work, but you also had a cold sweat.” From the West, near the wall, he recalls seeing “people in the East in their apartment buildings, in their windows hanging up their laundry and looking right at you. It was heart-wrenching, to be that close to somebody and realize that their world was utterly different.”
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