The Reconstruction of a European City. The case of Berlin.

To talk about Berlin’s reconstruction, have first to be considered the various destructions that the city underwent during the last century. Starting from the war demolitions, which reduced the city center to a huge ruin of itself. A cancellation taken to its extreme consequences in the following two decades when, instead of rebuilding the city as it was, the existing situation was conceived as a potential tabula rasa. The urban interventions carried out in the following years reflect the same principles, in which a new urban landscape substitutes the pre-existing compact structure, such as the southern portion of the Friedrichstadt. It will be necessary to wait until the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies to look back in critical terms to the results of this first phase of Berlin’s reconstruction.