art: berlin - The Hansa Quarter

In the East, the GDR had shown with Stalinallee what fantastic
architecture it was capable of building: workers' palaces! The West had
to counter. In the Hansaviertel, a former upper middle-class district
that had been almost completely destroyed during the war, houses were to
be built for people with little money. But where the East looked back
with socialist classicism, West Berlin invited the Who's Who of
modernist architects. And they all came! Experience urban masterpieces
by Le Corbusier, Oskar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Wils
Ebert, Egon Eiermann and Wassili Luckhardt. And enjoy an architectural
landscape into which the Tiergarten forest seems to flow. An almost
idyllic anti-urbanity in the middle of Berlin. We can only warmly
recommend the Karl Marx tour as a coherent complement to this tour,
because without the former Stalinallee, the Hansa Quarter would not
exist in this form. After these tours you will understand why these two
quarters, these "two sides of the same coin", will soon be UNESCO World
Heritage Sites...

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