Yesterday, Berlin’s Senate announced a project to add more units on top of already existing buildings in the city’s east, with a possible capacity of up to 50,000 new homes. The plan to add floors isn’t novel in itself, of course, even in Berlin. What’s striking is the specific type of building chosen for the experiment: East Berlin’s Plattenbau. These mass produced, partly prefabricated modernist apartment complexes (the name translates as “slab buildings” in reference to the concrete panels that form their walls) were put up in huge numbers during the Communist era. When a German thinks of a Communist-era building, a Plattenbau likely springs to mind. [...]
It’s not necessarily the case that Berlin is falling back in love with the Plattenbau’s aesthetics. The Senate’s plan, which will launch a partnership with social housing association Howoge to identify suitable Plattenbau for trial construction, is essentially pragmatic. The building type makes a great candidate for roof extensions. Plattenbau are almost always flat roofed and usually broader than they are tall, which means that additional floors could provide a lot of new apartments. Unlike the tenements in Berlin’s older districts, Plattenbau were generally set back from the sidewalk and placed among open spaces, so their height can grow without throwing the streets beneath them into permanent shade. And crucially, there are a very large number of them. Howoge estimates that it has 320,000 square meters (3,444,450 square feet) of roof space suitable for more construction, some of which could well host multiple floors.
If all this space was used it would transform the face of East Berlin, a place where it can be a struggle to find a building that doesn’t have a slab-covered façade. Plattenbau are ubiquitous across all East Germany, largely the product of a nationwide housing program launched in 1972 that saw the state build a phenomenal 1.9 million apartments across the country. Following a model that had been developed from the 1950s onwards, this housing program was able to speed up construction by preparing almost all of a building’s components offsite in a factory—even adding windows—before it was slotted together in the chosen location. Popular across the Eastern Bloc, the technique took off in such a big way partly because it fitted so well with the state’s yen for central planning.
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