Eastern Berlin Communist era housing

The chronic housing shortages faced in east germany following WWII forced the East German GDR government in 1955 to abandon traditional building methods in favor of an industrialized process of construction. In the next 5 years over 300,000 units were manufactured using factory built concrete slabs, this was expanded in the following years to several other prefabricated models.

In 1970 the state owned construction companies developed a unified system for the construction industry and developed the WBS 70 building type. This prefabracted concrete construction system,nicknamed “die Platte, was used in the construction of office buildings and housing throughout East Germany for nearly 20 years. By 1990 over 644,000 residential units were built using this same building system, and a total of 1,200,000 manufactured units in all. In East Berlin there are over 270,000 industrially produced residential units, representing 40% of the entire housing stock. Of these 100,000 apartments were produced using one particular model, the apartment construction series 70 (WBS 70).