Berliner Stadtmodelle (Berlin City Models) showcases fifteen influential residential complexes, tracing the evolution of housing construction in Berlin from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. The Hobrecht Plan’s “stone city” serves as the starting point for examining the reforms, alternative designs, and further developments that occurred during five epochs of Berlin’s recent urban development history.

The publication showcases projects that addressed the social and urban planning challenges of their time, ranging from Alfred Messel’s redesigned apartment buildings to early modernist cooperative housing and the programmatic buildings of Stalinallee and Hansaviertel, as well as urban renewal projects within the framework of the IBA 1987.

Plan drawings, axonometric projections, urban planning parameters, and accompanying essays make the projects comprehensible and comparable. Photographs by Berlin-based architectural photographer Maximilian Meisse show how the presented urban models have aged and which qualities have proven useful in today’s urban spaces.

The book offers a nonideological view of Berlin’s residential architecture and is intended as a tool for architects, planners, and anyone interested in the city’s history and future.

Berliner Stadtmodelle is a publication by Moritz Henkel, Ingemar Vol-lenweider, and Anna Jessen from the Department of Urban Design at TU Dortmund University. It is a follow-up to the out-of-print Atlas Ruhrgebiet – Von der Arbeitersiedlung bis zum experimentellen Wohnungsbau der Moderne.