The necessary materials were in short supply - and skilled professionals often were as well. In the more than forty years of the GDR’s existence, only about the same number of architects were trained in the GDR’s higher education institutions as graduated from the Federal Republic’s more than 50 universities, technical universities, comprehensive universities and Fachhochschulen in a single year (1990). Nevertheless, the fact cannot be overlooked that in the 1950s and even in the 1960s outstanding housing developments (in Eisenhuttenstadt, for example) and urban design ensembles (such as the “Lange Strasse” in Rostock) were built in what is now eastern Germany.