Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Apartment buildings in the Hansaviertel
IMAGEBROKER/ROBERT HARDING ©
The only remaining prewar buildings in what was East Berlin are Peter Behrens' Berolina-
haus (1930) and Alexanderhaus (1932).
West Berlin
In West Berlin, urban planners sought to eradicate any hint of monumentalism and to re-
build the city in a modernist fashion. Their equivalent of the Karl-Marx-Allee became the
Hansaviertel, a loosely structured leafy neighbourhood of mid-rise apartment buildings and
single-family homes, northwest of Tiergarten. Built from 1954 to 1957, it drew the world's
top architects, including Gropius, Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier and was intended to be a
model for other residential quarters.
The 1960s saw the birth of a large-scale public building project, the Kulturforum, a mu-
seum and concert-hall complex conceptualised by Hans Scharoun. His Berliner Philhar-
monie, the first building in the complex to be completed (1963), is considered a masterpiece
of sculptural modernism. Among the museums, Mies van der Rohe's temple-like Neue Na-
tionalgalerie (New National Gallery) is a stand out. A massive glass-and-steel cube, it
perches on a raised granite podium and is lidded by a coffered, steel-ribbed roof that seems
to defy gravity.
The West also struggled with a housing shortage and built its own versions of mass-scale
housing projects, including Gropiusstadt in southern Neukölln and the Märkisches Viertel in
Reinickendorf, in northwest Berlin.
In the 1920s Adolf Hitler's stepbrother Alois was a waiter at Weinhaus Huth, the only
complete building on Potsdamer Platz to survive WWII intact. During the Cold War, it
stood forlorn in the middle of the death strip for decades.
Interbau 1987
While mass housing mushroomed on the peripheries, the inner city suffered from decay and
neglect on both sides of the Wall. In West Berlin, an international architectural exposition
called Interbau (IBA) 1987 was to set new initiatives in urban renewal by blending two ar-
chitectural principles: 'Careful Urban Renewal' would focus on rehabilitating existing build-
ings; and 'Critical Reconstruction' would require any new buildings to fit in with the existing
urban fabric.
