A friend was wondering what Alexanderplatz in Berlin used to look like so…
Before the war it was a busy jumble of 19th-century styles including lots of extravagant Victorian wedding-cake ornamentation.
In the 1930s a couple of modern buildings were added.
After the war it was mostly rubble. The only thing that survived or was rebuilt as before was the two or three 30s-modern buildings. Other than that there’s not a single brick from before around 1950 or 1960 as is the case for about 90% of Berlin.
What you see today was finished around 1970 but heavily rebuilt in the 90s when they tore down lots of incredible fantastic midcentury space-age modern buildings throughout Berlin and the rest of Germany. The Centrum department store chain was known for its aluminum egg-crate facades that were different at every location. Two or three of them have survived in places like Dresden and Magdeburg.
Although Alexanderplatz was a colossal windswept concrete desert mostly suitable for military parades it had a lot of midcentury elegance that you can still faintly detect if you know how it used to be.
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