ABSTRACT
On 6 July 1957, the International Building Exhibition opened in West Berlin’s Hansaviertel-Tiergarten district. Better known as ‘Interbau’, a contraction of its German title Die Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin, architectural journalists quickly hailed it as the most important architectural exhibition since the war.2 It included, inter alia, a Congress Hall (by Hugh Stubbins), an industrial exhibition held at the permanent Berlin fairground near the Radio Tower, and eight national pavilions in the adjacent Tiergarten showing national approaches to building and construction technology.3 At its heart was a model settlement, which rebuilt war-devastated Hansaviertel as a modern residential district for 3000 people. This development, of course, provided much-needed housing, but it was also a display of work by a group of international architects. The organisers had invited 48 architects from Western Europe, Scandinavia and the USA to work on buildings for the settlement, especially seeking designs that might ‘stimulate new ideas on housing, particularly flatconstruction, and that these ideas would be adopted outside Berlin’.4
