Contrasting urban visions in former West and East Berlin

In the wake of Stalin's failed blockade of West Berlin, the Soviet-backed East German government set about building a socialist utopia amid the ruins of the city. In the early 1950s, West Berliners looked on aghast as new socialist-style apartment blocks (dubbed worker palaces) and retail buildings appropriated Prussian aesthetics along the grand boulevard of communist invention, Stalin Allee.

Meanwhile in the midst of bombed-out West Berlin, modernist masters like Le Corbusier, Egon Eiermann, Walter Gropius, Arne Jacobsen and Oscar Niemeyer were invited to pitch designs for "the city of tomorrow." The resulting Hansaviertel, or Hansa quarter, was shown off at the International Building Exhibition, the Interbau 1957, as reaction to the classical pomp of East Berlin's Stalin Allee.

Kino International — and the iconic Cafe Moskau next door — was not completed until the early 1960s. The buildings were part of the GDR's response to the Interbau exhibition held in West Berlin and the Hansaviertel in 1957. Today, Kino International is an iconic example of postwar modernism and is among the cinemas hosting the Berlin International Film Festival.

Located a few kilometers away from Hansaviertel in the Tiergarten park, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the Cultures of the World), or the "pregnant oyster," was built to showcase and debate international contemporary art. Designed in 1957 by architect Hugh Stubbins as a part of the Interbau exhibition, this gift from the US could importantly be seen from the other side of the Wall.

Another counterpoint to the pseudo Prussian classicism of Stalin Allee, iconic Swiss-French architect and designer Le Corbusier created this color-coded residential block as a "machine for living in." The light, airy living spaces and surrounding green space created the ultimate urban living experience, while it was built near the Olympic Stadium as an outpost of the Interbau due to its size.

By the early 1970s, the reconstruction of Karl Marx Allee would finally end at the vast Berlin Alexanderplatz. Embodying the shift back to Soviet-style international modernism, huge prefabricated residential skyscrapers dubbed "Plattenbau" rose up in every direction, while the Fernsehturm, or TV Tower, still dominates the scene.

The Berlin government also wants to add an existing social housing estate deep in the west to existing UNESCO-listed social housing estates in the city. Bruno Taut, utopian socialist and Bauhaus architect, was given an undeveloped area at the edge of Berlin to create a non-profit housing complex modeled on the garden city movement, and which would be an upgrade to his famed "Horseshoe" estate.

Bruno Taut conceived the airy, sun-filled "Horseshoe" housing estate (Hufeisensiedlung) in Berlin in the mid-1920s at the height of the Weimar Republic's social housing boom. He used modernist design to conflate the barrier between the chaotic, industrial city and a rural arcadia. It was designated UNESCO World Heritage in 2008; now Berlin aims to add more such utopian buildings to the list.