The 20th century has been crueler to Berlin than to most any other major city in the world. In architecture as in politics, Berlin is a birthplace of modernism -- the kind of avenging romantic modernism that was determined to demolish the past and rebuild the future from scratch. And so again and again for a half-century after World War I, the city was razed wholesale for the sake of ferocious social ideas: first, the Utopian housing tracts of the 1920s; then the Nazis' megalomaniacal neoclassicism in the '30s; the devastating Allied bombing raids in the '40s; the redoubled, misguided urban...
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