Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz is the most striking example of the urban renewal that turned Berlin into the ‘New Berlin’ in the 1990s although it is not, strictly-speaking, a square. The area today consists of the three developments known as Daimler City or the DaimlerChrysler Areal (1998), the Sony Centre (2000) and the Beisheim Centre (2004), which literally transformed the dormant wasteland where the Berlin Wall stood between east and west Berlin until 1989.The rebuilding of Potsdamerplatz, began in the 1980s when plans were initiated by urban development Senator Volker Hassener. Investors Daimler-Benz bought a plot of land along the Landwehr Canal to the Wall perimeter at a time when it was still considered a lifeless, peripheral site. Suddenly when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the plot became top real estate in the centre of the new German capital. The 1991 Berlin Senate’s publicly sponsored “Potsdamer and Leipziger Platz Competition for Urban Design Ideas” initiating a passionate debate where architectural offices from all around the world competed for a piece of the pie in the city of the cranes skyline. It was won by Munich-based Heinz Himmler and Christoph Sattler.