Browse Items (18 total)

"The automobile developed analogously to the bourgeois home, becoming a site for ‘dwelling within the car’ rather than ‘dwelling on the road’. [...] technical, safety and design increments added up to a cumulative change that was nothing short of…

Planned at a construction pace of a thousand kilometers per year, the Reichsautobahn—or Straßen Adolf Hitlers—was to crisscross all of the Reich’s territory. Combined with intense motorization—exemplified in the concept…

On 23 September 1933 the construction of the Reichsautobahn started south of Frankfurt. Hitler himself took a shovel to make the first dig. The planned pace was to construct around 800 miles of highways every year, for the overall projected length…

The window display of a butcher's shop in Lietzenburger Straße, Berlin, 1930s

A baker on a bike in the streets of Berlin, around 1937. Screenshots from Leo de Laforgue's film Berlin wie es war

Pipes—"not yet lowered into the ground"—on Potsdamer Platz, 1935

Construction workers in Berlin, view from above

The intense dynamic between the engineers and the “landscape advocates” involved in the Reichsautobahn designis best illustrated in the debate on how the highways should be laid upon landscape. The engineers, following the logic of the…