With the Hansaviertel, West Berlin wanted to offer an alternative to the dense Gründerzeit districts: The proportion of green spaces was much higher than in the densely built-up districts of Berlin.
The view of the city from a terrace: A river flows through the middle, its banks belonging entirely to nature and leisure. Urban life only begins at a reasonable distance. Cars, trucks, on the horizon the high-rise buildings for the new city dwellers, also surrounded by greenery. People can only be seen in the foreground of this poster with the headline “The city of tomorrow”. They stand on the terrace as wren, a small boy joyfully points to what is spreading out in front of him.
The urban landscape as a machine for happiness: the drawing adorns an Interbau brochure from 1957. With the West Berlin building exhibition, the Senate of the divided city wanted to kill several birds with one stone: to contrast cosmopolitan building with the confectionery splendor of Stalinallee in the eastern part of Berlin, to distance itself from the inhumane housing capitalism of the Gründerzeit – and to integrate the landscape into the new building. The Hansaviertel in the Tiergarten district was to be the first area in which “the city of tomorrow” would be realized.
Anyone walking through the district today will see one thing above all: unlike the Gründerzeit districts, which have made the leap into the new era with ease (and are correspondingly gentrified), the Hansaviertel is struggling to catch up. Although the residents – mostly owners – are satisfied with their apartments, the surroundings leave a lot to be desired. The infrastructure, shopping arcade, subway station, are neglected. Only the birds chirp as they always have.
Hansaviertel: The noble quarter, densely built up with stately Wilhelminian-style houses before the war, was largely destroyed in a bombing raid in 1943. At the beginning of the 1950s, it became something of a test case for modern urban planning. The West Berlin Senate invited internationally renowned architects, including Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius and Max Taut, to prove that architecture and social housing need not be mutually exclusive. By 1960, high-rise buildings and residential slabs, a library, a shopping center, a daycare center and the Academy of Arts had been built in Tiergarten. In 1957, the year of Interbau, a million people flocked to the construction site and the pavilion, a temporary structure that still stands today. Many of them used the new gondola lift that ran from Zoo station to the site. The new building and its landscape, as the poster “The city of tomorrow” already showed, is best admired from a bird’s eye view.
“A style is unquestionably visible in building,” was Willi Grohmann’s verdict in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung back then. “It is as international as all art today, the roots are in the ground, but the crown goes freely across all borders.” The pretty picture, which is intended to show that even modernism, which is storming towards the heavens, is down-to-earth and rooted in its traditions, was also a metaphor for the urban planners’ new affinity with the landscape. And this could also be measured in figures. While the ratio between built and undeveloped areas was 1:1.5 in the Gründerzeit, it was increased to 1:5.5 in the Hansaviertel. But what will remain of the Hansaviertel and its idea of a relaxed, green urban landscape? An alternative for future generations of architects? Or an error of architectural history, a discontinued model?
Read the full article in Garten + Landschaft 9/2015. Order the magazine here.