Can Architecture Transform Society? History of BERLIN Between Two Wars Told Through Buildings

This is the history Berlin between two wars, a time when people actually believed that they can build a better society through architecture. It starts with a trauma of WWI which discredited all forms of the past. The only hope is that a better world might be build in the rubble. However, peoples visions for this better world differ as do their ideas about how it should be built. One thing everyone agrees on: this better world is going to need new buildings. But do you tear down the old and built a perfect world on a blank slate, or should you keep the old and make space for the new to take shape around it... loosing patience with the second approach they'll try the first one…

*ACT 1 FIGURE GROUND*
Berliners are traumatized and disoriented after unexpected defeat in the war. Many are ready to tear down hoping that a better society could be built in the rubble. But social democrats do not want to tear down, they want the make space for the new by giving people liberties and a say in how they are governed. However, in order to suppress those inclined to tearing down (the Spartacus League, later Communist Party) they make a deal with the disgraced military. Chaos ensues as the fragile democracy struggles to take root.
00:00 Spirit of 1914
01:45 November Revolution of 1918–1919
02:40 Proclamation of the republic in Germany
03:36 Ebert–Groener pact
04:06 Murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht

*ACT 2 PAPER HEAVENS*
A young generation of architects is determined to build a better society. They want to do it by building new kinds of buildings in a revolutionary style of architecture - modernism. However no building can be done in the postwar chaos, so the architects turn to the blank slates of their papers where they are free to imagine radically new forms of buildings unconstrained by demands of reality.

04:27 New style
05:47 Bruno Taut's Glass Pavilion form 1914
06:14 Bruno Taut's Falkenberg Garden City (1913 -1916)
06:57 The City Crown (Die Stadtkrone), Taus's vision of an ideal city published in 1919
07:39 Mies van de Rohe's Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project from 1921
08:25 Cornelis van Eesteren's Unter den Linden Project form 1925

*ACT 3 PAPERWORK*
As the economy recovers the new Weimar Republik can do some building. Although the Republik is not inclined toward tearing down the old, it allows for something radically new to be built around it, housing for the people very different form overcrowded tenements built before the war. Ideas of revolutionary architects must now enter into a conversation with reality.

09:05 Dawes Plan
09:25 Rentenmark solves hyperinflation
09:51 Greater Berlin Act, 1920
10:55 The Golden 20s
11:22 Mietskaserne/rental barracks, typical tenements of industrial Berlin
11:03 building code change and introduction of the rent tax
12:29 Housing Associations
13:08 Martin Wagner, the Stadtbaurat

*ACT 4 HORSESHOE FOR GOOD LIFE*
14:46 The Horseshoe Estate (Hufeisensiedlung) by GEHAG
16:45 across the street, the Krugpfuhl Estate by DeGeWo

*18:04 ACT 5 ROOFS AMONG THE PINE TREES*
18:11 Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf, also known as Onkel Toms Hütte buit by GEHAG
20:05 Roof War
20:45 Siedlung am Fischtalgrund built by GAGFAH in 1928
21:17 Heinrich Tessenow

22:30 MEANWHILE...

24:45 ACT 6 REICHSTAG'S SWAN SONG

27:05 ACT 7 ONE ROOF SYSTEM

29:15 ACT 8 FUHRERS DREAM, PEOPLES REALITY

33:54 CONCLUSION

[tzvetanpetzev]

Awesome video! So glad you're continuing to make them. Thank you very much!

[jaykaygxd]

No true socialist was for a nationalist imperialist war Lmfao just diametrically opposes socialist philosophies, you may be on about the social democrats who weren’t socialist and sold out real socialist people like Rosa Luxembourg to the right wing paramilitaries in order to keep capitalism going on as usual