Mitte!

The city of Berlin is planning significant redesigns of its center. The enormous open spaces and roads suggest an effortless opportunity for construction. However, if one wants to discuss these plans thoroughly—something that is urgently needed!—one must be aware of the architectural fate of the historical center: it seems largely forgotten. Yet this place is highly charged with significance—beneath the grass and asphalt, within a mere square kilometer, lie the cellar walls from eight hundred years of city history. Nowhere else, in an area that is today bordered by the city railway to the east and north, and by the Spree Canal to the south and west, does Berlin possess such deep urban traces. However, the current state reveals almost none of this. It is the result not only of the bombing raids in the 1940s but even more so of an extreme modernization on a European scale that followed.