ON THESES and REMS

On June 17, 1979, Eija-Riita Eklaf, a Swedish woman, married the Berlin Wall at Grosse-Ziethener Strasse, taking Wall Winther Berliner-Mauer as her name. The final piece of heroic modernist architecture, the Berlin Wall was constructed just as the movement’s Utopian political ambitions had begun to wane. By then, with the eastward spread of modernism during the Khrushchev years, the ideological distinctiveness of modernity had come to an end, making East-West, modern-antimodern harder to distinguish. Still, the architects of the Berlin Wall hoped it would change society.