A DECADE AGO, when I lived in Berlin, I would often detour from my daily run through Tiergarten, the city’s appealingly untended park, to visit certain buildings I felt drawn to for reasons I couldn’t name. These were largely (though not exclusively) midcentury dwellings — some neglected, others wildly overgrown — on or in the park that seemed to reify my sense of the city’s layered strangeness, of its mystery and opportunity for discovery. All architecture conveys a set of narratives, histories and values for how best to live, and today’s Berlin, a jumble of tragedy and utopian ambitions past — and, these days, encroaching foreign investment — can feel like an especially dark choose-your-own-adventure story. Both were the result of the International Building Exhibition’s Interbau 57, for which prominent architects of the era were invited to design residential housing in Berlin, just over a decade after the end of World War II. This, of course, was long before the money and glamour arrived, in those years of eerie stasis when West Berlin was a small enclave marooned within East Germany; the resulting buildings — inexpensive, socially attuned, beautifully rendered — were created in a burst of postwar idealism, helping to fill in the vast gaps in the cityscape and to house displaced people.

Source: International New York Times November 10, 2020 15:00 UTC