Architectural exhibitions are usually ephemeral events. They are dependent on media representation so that people can form an image of them later. Ideally, what remains of them are books, catalogs, reports and photographic views. For many, this is not the case. They are in danger of being forgotten all the more quickly. And even building exhibitions such as the famous Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914 can disappear without a trace.

Exhibitions therefore require documentation in order to be passed on to posterity, and it is a stroke of luck when one comes across photos in archives, journals or libraries that are of particular importance for historical reconstruction.

One such stroke of luck is the 1989 publication “The Berlin Tenement 1945-1989” (Das Berliner Mietshaus) by Johann Friedrich Geist and Klaus Kürvers, which is freely accessible online. Here, as part of a larger research project, the meticulously reconstructed and contextualized cosmos of the exhibition “Berlin Plans” (Berlin plant) unfolds, which took place in Berlin almost 80 years ago in the summer of 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War.

The book offers access to a world at a historical turning point that has itself been overtaken by history. We see pictures of war-ravaged Berlin, until recently the capital of the “Third Reich,” of which now 40 percent are reduced to rubble and ashes. We see views of the exhibition rooms in the ruined Berlin Palace, which was blown up four years later, then built over by the Palace of the German Democratic Republic and finally replaced by the Humboldt Forum. The Berlin public can be seen looking at the plans and models of the exhibited “collective plan,” which, in accordance with the Athens Charter, envisages the rebuilding of the—not yet divided—Berlin as a loosened-up, functionally structured “urban landscape.”

The suspended fabric ceiling indicates that the room was provisionally refurbished especially for the show, while the modern, airy and curvy exhibition design anticipates the Swinging Fifties. The contrast could hardly be greater.

The exhibition and its reconstruction are both time capsules into a past future that never became reality.

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