Throughout the 1990s, Berlin has been a city obsessed with architectural and planning issues. Exhibitions, television, video, film, radio, literature, newspapers and magazines have all played their role in stimulating and feeding public debate, not merely in Berlin, nor indeed Germany, but throughout the world. There have been myriad publications on the “New Berlin,” most of which focus on the reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz, Europe's “largest building site.” Architects, architectural historians, urban planners, cultural historians, sociologists and others have been drawn to Berlin, fascinated by the chance to experience at first hand the massive reconstruction of a European capital city for the twenty-first century and the consequences of the dramatic events of 1989, signified most poignantly by the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Berlin, architecture and the politics of reunification quickly became intertwined; in a time of rapid political change, the architecture of the new capital has come to provide reassurance of Germany's national identity and its orientation to the West.

In addition to its central role in (re)defining German national identity, however, the architecture of “New Berlin” has also come to be seen as a test case for the role and nature of architecture at the millennium and beyond: