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Re­ject­ing the idea of a sin­gle, his­tor­i­cal­ly de­fined ur­ban mod­el, Hans Koll­hoff tries to in­ter­pret the com­plex di­alec­tic na­ture of the ur­ban mor­phol­o­gy of Berlin with his com­pe­ti­tion de­sign for the re­build­ing of Pots­dammer Platz and Leipziger Platz. Hav­ing si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly passed over the mod­ern idea of ur­ban-​land­scape as a col­lec­tion of freely com­posed ob­jects re­lat­ed by ab­stract re­la­tions, and the his­toric mod­el of the Eu­ro­pean city as el­e­men­tary mon­u­ment-​sur­round­ing and tex­ture-​emer­gence re­la­tion­ship, Koll­hoff makes an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the mod­ern city-​land­scape in terms of an in­de­pen­dent and het­ero­ge­neous in­te­grat­ed sys­tem of fig­ures. The tow­er, as ty­po­log­i­cal and icono­log­i­cal strat­i­fi­ca­tion, is a metaphor­i­cal ex­pres­sion of the di­alec­tic na­ture of the ur­ban struc­ture of a metropo­lis grown up as a mi­ni-​cities col­lage.The pro­ject as reread­ing and rewrit­ing of the ur­ban palimpsest rep­re­sents the crit­i­cal con­struc­tion of the his­tor­i­cal di­men­sion of the city: moder­ni­ty as a pro­ject of his­tor­i­cal con­ti­nu­ity is the as­sign­ment of crit­i­cal val­ue to his­to­ry it­self.