Postcard from Germany

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 (Hansa Quarters), 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…

Thursday Take Me To…