Anything Goes?, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin: 30 October 2020–22 March 2021

Widely labeled as ‘postmodern’, these architectures offered colourful diversity and challenged previous ideas of the modern architectural world. It drew on stylistic devices from the past to test alternative planning lifestyles. In the run-up to celebrating 750 years since the original town charter, the entries submitted to the ‘Internationale Bauasstellung’ in West Berlin in 1984/7 and the ‘Baaysstellung’ of 1987 in East Berlin turned the city into an architectural laboratory observed worldwide, with designs attracting praise and criticism from all over. In many places this era of architecture, often considered architecturally misguided, has been re-built or revamped.

This is the first exhibition to show who and what set their stamp on the buildings and visions developed for East and West Berlin in the final decade before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.