Natalie Holmes profiles one of Berlin’s few post-war female architects…

If you’ve spent even a small amount of time in Berlin, chances are you’ll have walked past one of Hilde Weström’s buildings, even if you didn’t know it. One of the very few female architects of postwar Berlin, Weström helped to rebuild the city with compassionate housing that was necessarily pragmatic and avoided ostentation.

Born on 31 October, 1912, Weström was an ambitious architect from the outset; her lifetime was one of consistent disregard for gender-based social boundaries, which she proceeded to smash and overturn one by one. One of a handful of women enrolled in architectural studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Polytechnic in 1932, Weström went on to become one of the first women accepted into the Bund Deutscher Architekten (Association of German Architects) in 1948.

In between, she moved to Dresden to avoid the Nazification of her Berlin university, and then to Breslau (now Wroclaw), where she worked during World War Two. After the war, Weström returned to Berlin, where her career began to take off; the destruction of 66,000 homes—one third of the city’s housing—presenting an unlikely and somewhat tragic opportunity for budding architects at the time.

“Die zerstörte Stadt war meine Chance”  (“The ruined city was my chance”), she reminisced much later, a quote so significant and telling that it was lifted by the Berlinische Galerie as the title of an exhibition to celebrate the architect’s centenary in 2012.

Though Weström’s buildings embody what today feels like the strange and singular coldness of postwar West German modernity, the somewhat nondescript, functional exteriors mask an intention—and fulfilment—of tenderness and warmth. Building homes that were livable and affordable was the order of the day, and Weström did so by starting at the heart.