Interbau Apartment House

About this place

The Interbau Apartment House is Oscar Niemeyer's sole built work in Germany, constructed in 1957 as part of the International Building Exhibition (Interbau) in West Berlin's Hansaviertel district. The exhibition was a deliberately political project: the Federal Republic of Germany invited leading architects from across the Western world to rebuild a bombed-out neighbourhood adjacent to the Soviet sector, presenting modern democratic architecture as a counterpoint to Socialist Realism visible across the divide. Niemeyer contributed an eight-storey residential slab raised on pilotis, its long facade carrying a gentle curve that distinguishes it immediately from the more rectilinear contributions of his contemporaries. The building is modest in scale but unmistakably Brazilian in its formal sensibility — the curve is not structural necessity but spatial generosity, softening the street edge and giving the building a fluency that the surrounding blocks do not have. The ground floor, open beneath the pilotis, connects the building to the Tiergarten parkland behind. The Hansaviertel as a whole is worth exploring as an open-air museum of post-war European modernism: the Interbau brought together Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Jacob Bakema, Hans Scharoun and others in a single neighbourhood. Niemeyer's block sits among them as an outlier in the best sense — formally distinct, rooted in a different architectural tradition, and still inhabited and well maintained. The building is residential and not open to visitors, but the exterior and pilotis level are freely accessible from the street.