What happens if you take the conceptual essence of a design that has worked well in one place and invest it in another? This is the scenario proposed by Berlin Transfer. Inverting the direction in which knowledge has been exported since colonial times, the book reveals the potential of architectural and urban design concepts from the Global South to inform unconventional approaches of urban development in the northern hemisphere.

What happens if you take the conceptual essence of a design that has worked well in one place and invest it in another? This is the scenario proposed by Berlin Transfer. Inverting the direction in which knowledge has been exported since colonial times, the book reveals the potential of architectural and urban design concepts from the Global South to inform unconventional approaches of urban development in the northern hemisphere.

The second volume of the series, Hybrid Modernities, invests a sensual reading of Brazilian hedonistic modernism to challenge the generic, if not austere appeal of Berlin’s modernist housing complexes. By applying strategies of extension, insertion and reprogrammation to existing buildings, the book exposes an unlikely contextual potential of generic urban prototypes from Berlin’s post-war era.