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15

Hansaviertel

TIERGARTEN

It would take a very untrained eye not to notice something unusual going on just south of the Bellevue S-Bahn station. There are certainly some signs of normalcy – the broad streets lined with chestnut trees, the traffic, the shops around Hansaplatz. But the way the buildings are all completely different in terms of shape, colour, form and ‘personality’ suggest something is afoot.

Collectively, the buildings that dot the northwest corner of the Tiergarten are known as the Hansaviertel, a residential quarter built between 1957 and 1961 on the older neighbourhood of the same name. As part of the International Building Exhibition (Interbau), no fewer than 53 architects from around the world – including big hitters like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer and Arne Jacobsen – were invited to design the buildings. Theirs was an ostentatious attempt not only to rebuild a bombed-out part of the city, but also to provide an ideological antidote to East Berlin; specifically, the repetitive concrete blocks of Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee - see p. 200).

A proud homage to the cult of the individual, the Hansaviertel buildings are spread out across a vast swathe of green, interspersed with cultural and practical necessities like a library and two churches, a barber and grocery store. Some buildings have large windows that face the morning sun; others are constructed with brightly coloured blocks. Some are 16 stories high, while others are bungalows. Some blend into the background while others leap out at you, like the one designed by Niemeyer, which teeters on V-shaped pillars and hides a separate monolithic edifice for the rear elevator.

Most apartments are bright and open, glass dissolving the boundary between indoors and out. While their presence once smacked of political ideology, today they serve as a serene and scenic alternative, and, to a city now in its next stages of urban planning, a suggestion of what could be. TE

Bordered by the Spree, west edge of Tiergarten, and Str. des 17. Juni, 10557;

S Bellevue, U Hansaplatz

Map: West E1