Luxury Apartments with a Tenement Heart The Kurfürstendamm and the Berliner Zimmer

摘要

The residential architecture that defined Berlin's famous boulevard of luxury, the Kurfurstendamm, has receded within the collective memory of Ger-mans and non-Germans on account of the narrative that historians and novelists have presented over the past eighty years. Those writers have focused upon the boulevard's upscale entertainment and retail life, which blossomed in the 1920s. However, the majority of buildings that defined this two-mile avenue were opulent apartment houses completed before 1914, when entertainment and retail establishments were permitted to occupy only the street-level spaces of a few buildings in the boulevard's easternmost section. To appreci-ate the context in which the Kurfurstendamm was created requires an understanding of this dominant building type, heretofore not examined to any appreciable extent by schol-ars.1 It also requires an appreciation of the importance of a local planning arrangement, the so-called Berliner Zimmer, or "Berlin room," which was used by architects in the major-ity of Kurfurstendamm buildings. This peculiarity had been present since the 1840s in the typical, modest Berlin Miet-shaus, or apartment building, and it was also an aspect of Berlin's infamous Mietskaserne, or tenement rental "barracks" of the 1860s. Created as a response to space limitations, theBerliner Zimmer tradition proved to be resilient and tena-cious, and it quite unexpectedly continued within the vast, opulent apartments of the Kurfurstendamm.