Imagining the New Berlin: Modernism, Mass Utopia, and the Architectural Avant-Garde

Abstract

There are few cities in which the historical encounter between urbanism and modernism found such heightened, and often controversial, expression as in Berlin, the capital of the embattled Weimar Republic, the center of the literary and artistic avant-gardes, and the site of fundamental changes in the organization of urban life. The transformation of the metropolis into the home of the modern masses can be measured by the actual interventions of architects and city-planners into the historically grown cityscape. Yet the reorganization of urban functions can also be examined through architecture’s failed opportunities, missed chances, and glaring mistakes. It is in recognition of the overdetermined function of modern architecture as mass utopia that this chapter focuses on visions of the metropolis that, for better or for worse, remained unrealized. Architecture’s utopian qualities, I argue, provided a privileged means for exploring the complicated relationship between aesthetic innovation and social progress and for enlisting quintessential urban structures like the highrise (Hochhaus) in the representation of modern mass society. The broader implications for the project of urbanism and modernity are nowhere more apparent than in Ludwig Hilberseimer’s unrealized 1928 proposal for an office and business complex in Berlin’s historical Friedrichstadt (figure 4.1).