The site of today's Moabiter Werder has been the property of the city of Berlin since the 13th century. Since 1850, Moabit has increasingly settled in industrial facilities, including a shipyard on the river Spree. The Spree meadows, which had been essentially unchanged for centuries, had to be transformed fundamentally: the Spree was channeled, its shores were heaped up to create the technical conditions for the transfer of goods from water to rail. In addition to the railway systems, buildings were built for customs and taxation. Houses, Sheds and railway tracks were heavily damaged during the Second World War.

In the 1960s, freight transport on the Moabiterwerder finally came to a standstill. Freight forwarding and storage companies used a part of the terrain, the remaining area was cleared for future construction of a city motorway, for commercial enterprises or service facilities of buildings. For the Federal Garden Show in 1991, which was to be held again in West Berlin, the Berlin Senate had a new parking facility planned on the Moabiterwerder along the Spree in the 1980s. At the same time, as a continuation of the nearby Hansaviertel, some skyscrapers with a total of about 1,200 residential units were to be built.

With the German reunification in 1990 and the capital decision of the German Bundestag in 1991, these plans were at first irrelevant. Now the area lay in the immediate vicinity of existing or planned functional buildings of the federal capital and should be used accordingly.