Kaiser’s Palace to be Rebuilt

Italian architect Francesco Stella has won a competition to rebuild Berlin’s baroque palace, once home to Prussia’s rulers and the Kaiser, 60 years after it was destroyed on the orders of the East German communist regime. Stella plans to restore three of the four original baroque facades, with a glass-covered courtyard behind the main entrance. To make space for the reconstructed palace, which was inhabited by the Prussian rulers and by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany until his abdication in 1918, the Communist-era bronze-glass, steel and concrete Palast der Republik, once home to East Germany’s show parliament, is being dismantled.