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

In the 1880s the Kurfürstendamm was developed with opulent apartments for Berlin's Grossbürgertum, or haute bourgeoisie. It was designed to be the counterpart to the Champs-Elysées. Luxury Apartments with a Tenement Heart: The Kurfürstendamm and the Berliner Zimmer analyses the plans of these apartments, whose dining rooms—called Berliner Zimmer—retained a planning peculiarity from Berlin's infamous tenements, or Mietskaserne. Through careful comparison, Douglas Mark Klahr shows that the Berliner Zimmer interrupted the circulation pattern for visitors and residents in a manner and to a degree not seen in comparable Parisian residences of the same period. Although building ordinances and economics shaped important aspects of Berlin's domestic architecture, this humble plan feature endured in the architecture of the wealthy because of the rootedness of Grossbürgertum identity in the values and architecture of the lower middle and working classes.