I first visited Berlin's housing estates in 2006,and was very pleased to find how many survived the war,and how well they had been maintained and restored by the enlightened Berlin authorities.I did not have an exhaustive list of sites at the time,and discovered my hotel was only yards from the Weisse Stadt,which I did not previously know.

I have visited many famous modernist sites -Villa Savoye,Barcelona Pavilion,Quartiers Fruges,Weissenhofsiedlung,Karl Marx Hof,and so on,but the sheer number,scale and setting of the Berlin estates and their lesser-known ,later copies overwhelmed me. The suburbs of Berlin truly show what progressive architecture and landscaping can do to transform the urban environment -I think Berlin is more beautiful than Sienna or Rome,taken as a whole.