The Perfect Modularity of East German Housing

The German Democratic Republic built a lot of apartments from prefab material in an effort to alleviate their perennial housing shortage. They had a great name for it, Plattenbauweise, which is only a long word when you consider the technique is called “Large Panel System building” in English. Basically, the builders took a bunch of concrete slabs and tacked them onto a frame. If you were really lucky, you lived behind a slab equipped with a balcony. I saw a lot of them in Berlin when I lived there, but I was lucky enough to never live in one myself. The apartments tended to be efficient (read: cramped and utterly lacking in character). And they were almost infinitely modular – so interchangeable, in fact, that you can play Tetris with them:

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)