Bruno Flierl, a German architect, and architecture critic stated that ‘architecture and society are reciprocally bound together…. Once created, architecture has the effect of either cultivating or inhibiting the communal practice of humans’ lives, their existence, and their consciousness.’
        The City Shaped_Berlin is an ongoing project which investigates the physical shaping of Berlin’s urban and social fabric. Berlin’s built condition is inherently tied to the social, political, and economic fluctuations of the past two centuries. During the cold war, architecture and ‘urban planning proved to be one of the most important ways that both sides postured for dominance…’ (Ladd, 1997; Storm, 2001), where the physical fabric becomes material propaganda. Housing on both sides were used as avenues to express such dominance and power, while also physically controlling the ways their inhabitants lived. 
        The Plattenbau is an example of such housing; directly translated as ‘panel building’, these buildings were almost entirely prefabricated off site. This building typology proliferated the landscape of the German Democratic Republic on a large scale, with 1.9 million state built apartments constructed in East Germany between 1972 and 1980. Neighbourhoods, such as Marzahn in Berlin, were built almost entirely with this type of prefabricated construction. The Plattenbau typology and its impact on the physical and social fabric of Berlin is explored in the installation titled Plattenbau.