Interbau ’57: Exploring Berlin’s Hansaviertel

Jesse Simon takes a stroll through the Hansaviertel, yesterday’s city of tomorrow…

On the 22nd of November 1943 a group of allied bombers made a pass over Berlin, dropping several hundred bombs along their path. For the Hansaviertel, a small residential quarter sandwiched just south of Moabit between the Tiergarten and the Spree, it was the end.

The area had once resembled any number of Berlin neighbourhoods, with over three hundred residential blocks lining a series of streets that radiated outward from the central intersection—Hansa Platz—that gave the small district its name. It had suffered its first damage during a bombing raid earlier in the year, but after the additional November destruction only a handful of buildings remained.

Similar stories can be told for nearly every locality in Berlin: there were few parts of the city that remained untouched by the war. Where the story of the Hansaviertel diverges from that of other neighbourhoods is in what happened afterwards.

Rebuilding Berlin

By 1950, Berlin was divided between the three Western sectors controlled by Allied powers, and the eastern sector under Soviet control. The two factions may have been politically opposed, but they shared a common burden of widespread devastation and a severe shortage of housing.

The Soviet authorities chose a destroyed section of the city east of Alexanderplatz—along a street formerly known as Große Frankfurter Straße—as the site for an ambitious demonstration of post-war housing along socialist lines. The street, which was renamed Stalinallee in 1949, was widened and lined with monumental, Soviet-style eight-storey blocks, each featuring an assortment of shops and services at ground-level.

The result was undeniably impressive and also somewhat austere; but with its integrated shopping and transit connections along the axis of the U-Bahn, it was not without its own functional charm. Whatever one thought about it, it was undoubtedly a new form of urbanism, resembling neither the close-packed streets of Altbauten, nor the edge-city Siedlungen (housing estates) that had defined Berlin before the war.

It was partially in response to the rhetorical monumentality of Stalinallee that the West Berlin senate started to plan their own exhibition of what the future of the city could look like. Where the buildings of Stalinallee offered an idealised illustration of collective living, the authorities of West Berlin wanted to demonstrate that higher-density urban spaces could be created at a less authoritarian and more human scale.

The idea of an international exhibition, in which architects from around the (western) world were invited to submit their ideas for new modes of housing, was proposed as early as 1951. Two years later it was decided that the former Hansaviertel would serve as the site for this experiment in modern urban design. The piles of rubble were cleared away—along with the few remaining buildings that had survived the war—and the area was completely resurveyed; the number of land plots had to be reduced considerably in preparation for larger buildings.