Architecture Commons^™

Luxury Apartments With A Tenement Heart: The Kurfürstendamm And The Berliner Zimmer., Douglas Mark Klahr

School of Architecture Faculty Publications

The residential architecture that defined Berlin's famous boulevard of luxury, the Kurfürstendamm, has receded within the collective memory of Germans 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.