Astra Zarina, a pioneering female architect who helped design Berlin's Märkisches Viertel housing complex in the 1960s, has largely vanished from architectural history despite her significant contributions to post-war urban planning. Born on August 25, 1929, in Riga, Latvia, Zarina built only one major structure in Berlin, yet her influence on architecture extends far beyond that single project.
Zarina's journey to architectural prominence began when her family fled Latvia in 1949, traveling through Austria and Germany before settling in the United States. She graduated with honors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and subsequently worked for Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who would later design the World Trade Center. At Yamasaki's firm, she was recognized as one of the best draftswomen and planners.
In 1960, shortly after becoming the first woman ever to win the Rome Prize from the American Academy, Zarina was recruited alongside her first husband, Douglas Philipp Haner, to join a team of architects planning the Märkisches Viertel. This residential complex, which still lacks subway access and remains somewhat isolated in northern Berlin, was envisioned as the city's newest and most modern housing development.
The area was originally characterized by small gardens and rural landscapes. Even today, residential towers rise directly next to the grain fields of Brandenburg. Senate Building Director Düttmann and his colleagues decided to create urgently needed housing for up to 50,000 people, as Berlin was already suffering from acute housing shortages. To ensure the architects had not worked under the National Socialists, planners primarily hired young foreign architects.
From 1963 to its final completion in 1974, these architects built a total of 17,000 apartments. Among the 35 architects involved, Astra Zarina was the only woman. At the time, in her early thirties and traveling from Seattle to Rome, the project must have seemed like a great opportunity.
However, in Berlin, Zarina encountered a rigid bureaucratic apparatus that prioritized adherence to building codes and standards over thoughtfully conceived deviations. Her initial designs for the section of Märkisches Viertel that she and Haner were to plan featured residential units forming courtyards and ground-level shopping areas – a mix and coexistence of living, housing, and working spaces.
The Berlin developers of that era, however, understood the new district as a blueprint on the drawing board where different areas of life should barely touch each other. "It was brutality with which we made poetry there," Düttmann described the district to the Tagesspiegel newspaper in 1967. Problems emerged as soon as the first residents moved in starting in 1963, many stemming from underdeveloped infrastructure despite people already living there – kindergartens were still closed, playgrounds not yet built, and trees not yet grown.
While Berlin's initial problems became visible, Zarina had already moved to Rome, where she would spend the rest of her life. She noted that the project had made her neither rich nor famous – perhaps exactly what she had hoped for. She separated from her husband during the planning phase, and although she completed the project alone, it was her ex-partner's name that repeatedly appeared in Märkisches Viertel documents while her own disappeared.
Despite this erasure from official records, Zarina carved her place in architectural history not through large, resource-consuming buildings, but through teaching. After years of commuting between Rome and Seattle due to her teaching position at Washington University, Zarina, now a professor, proposed to the dean that he send six promising architecture students to Rome, arguing she could teach much better there.
In 1970, the first group of American architecture students arrived, and Zarina housed them in her own apartment. Originally conceived as a one-time exchange, this became the start of the university's Rome program, which continues today across various academic disciplines.
When Zarina first visited Civita di Bagnoregio, a mountain village about an hour from Rome, in the 1960s, fewer than ten people lived there and the tuff stone foundations were crumbling beneath them like fresh ricotta cheese. Zarina brought her students along, restored several buildings, and established the Civita Institute, which exists today and is dedicated to preserving the mountain village.
Zarina taught habitus and the self-understanding with which one moves through the world. Students were housed with local families and worked with Zarina to preserve the village using available resources. They learned to preserve things rather than tear them down and rebuild them.
Zarina profoundly influenced many of her students, some of whom still credit their careers and how they perceive the built environment to her guidance. Her teaching extended beyond theory or general architecture. She once said, "If you want to be an architect you have to know how to cook." She regularly held "Didactic Dinners," where she showed young Americans how to prepare chicken with tarragon and pomegranate sauce, that a small glass of Fernet Branca belonged at the end of a workday, and how to engage in conversation with invited Roman friends and intellectuals.
By changing the standards by which architectural success is measured, many other interesting architectural figures whose work has received little attention suddenly come into focus. Looking at Astra Zarina's story and the many traces she left in architecture, not least through her students, one understands why this perspective urgently needs to change. A publication about Astra Zarina by the article's author will be published in spring 2026 by Hatje Cantz.
