berlin

berlin took me by surprise. i was not prepared for its ugly beauty, its ruins and masterpieces. this was mostly because i didn't know anything about the city until i was there. i had read articles and architectural history about haussmann's paris and knew something about london, but i didn't really know anything about berlin. i printed off some google maps, started doing research, and somehow learned about the current city. but still i didn't know anything about the history of berlin, really. i knew about the wall (a recent book i read calls it the last great piece of modern architecture) but i didn't know its position in the city. i knew about some famous buildings there but not the neighborhoods, the immigrants in the city, the good public transit system, and the vibrant lives that people lead there. so i guess when you know nothing you are bound to be surprised by anything. i half-expected to find a city drowned in its past, unable to escape out of its history, but instead i found a churning cultural pot that acknowledges its story for the sake of tourism and continues forward with its urban life.

for a while i didn't know where i was going to stay but i ended up couchsurfing with this generous old woman named gabi, pictured in the photo above with the neue palais in potsdam. her contribution as a host made my experience much better. she gave advice about where to go, graciously provided meals, and talked a lot about her experience living in west berlin since 1971. we also had a nice trip to park sanssouci in potsdam where the kaisers used to rule from. she also let me borrow hercules, the proud stallion you see pictured above. it was nice to get to know her.

i took the train to berlin. the ride is about 5.5 hours from eastern holland but about 6.5 hours all the back to schiphol from berlin. train rides are always a singular experience, watching the landscape zoom by while listening to javelin or koushik. on the way back, a guy from africa was sitting across the aisle from me. i had to watch in disgust as the german police walked through the sparsely populated cabin, checking nobody's papers, but instead hassled this man for almost 15 minutes. they asked him why he was here, where he was working, where his wife was, why he was in germany, where had he been before that, in english. he lives in berlin but works in essen and they thought this was strange and hassled him, asking why he doesn't just move to essen instead, etc. after they got bored of joking with him, they moved off. i don't know if they were responding to some alert they had or were just being assholes and interrogating the only black man in the train compartment. what an annoying experience.

ok, back to berlin. i spent 3.5 nice days there, walking around neighborhoods looking at buildings and looking in museums. jean-paul here has an architecture guide to modern buildings in berlin so i borrowed that (thanks jean-paul!). it was in german but there were maps so it was useful. it seems like berlin has spent a fair amount of time forgetting its history as traces of the wall were gone except for bricks in the street tracing its path and a few relic pieces for the tourists. it has quickly adapted to its new political environment of being a magnetic immigrant city, an art center, and a tourist destination. i will spare you the myriad tiny moments of joy i had because those can get tiring to hear about if they aren't delivered in worthwhile dave eggers prose, but i will give some highlights:

-seeing large examples of mies van der rohe's early and late work, the afrikanischestraße housing in wedding in what remains a highly immigrant and working class neighborhood and his neue nationalgalerie in the kulturforum near potsdamer platz, separated by about 50 years of work. the mies aesthetic has been thoroughly appropriated in berlin, as you see it (black steel columns that are a cross in plan, as one example) in S-bahn station entrances and museums around the town.

-potsdamer platz and crossing another renzo piano building off the list. this was a pretty normal complex but still elegant. here santa drove a motorcycle with a side car and breakdancers spun on their heads next to a section of the berlin wall where you could have your real passport stamped with an east german stamp by a chainsmoking soldier in costume. also here i witnessed the pigeon stack (shown above). it gave me new hope for my upcoming architecture thesis on the use of columns of live birds as structural support for a building. also the roof of the sony center was this impressive tension structure thing that anyone who has taken john ochsendorf's class would appreciate.

-graffiti and falafel everywhere. delicious on both accounts.

-the awesome museums. the newly-renovated neues museum on museuminsel by david chipperfield is gorgeous. i always always love renovated ruins but this is the most beautiful one i have seen so far. it was bombed out during WWII i think. and, of course, what did it house but more artifacts from ancient egypt and greece. it is amazing how obsessed these european cultures are with the ancient world as a way of displaying their power or permanence. there were a ton of german excursions to egypt to raid tombs and pilfer statues from the unaware africans. ok, also the altes museum by schinkel was good to see. the art was standard but the building was nice because i had heard a lot about it in class. on my final night i spent 3 hours at libeskind's jewish museum in kreuzberg. i didn't like the building. it was too allegorical and unexplained for me. the way libeskind explains the building sounds like a good set up for a magical realism story or some lebbeus woods project but not a building you actually should build. you enter underground through the old building and are faced with 3 cardinal axes that are named after thinks like Remembrance, Holocaust, etc. there is a huge void that you can enter where there is only natural light from a small window and you feel the absence of jewish presence in germany's history (that was the main point of the building in libeskind's architecture). plus the random diagonal windows give me a headache. the gallery space is a thin zig-zag that felt too compressed and the exhibits were not designed that maturely. if i was a kid i would have loved the building. the main staircase was nice though with some beams overhead. the main highlight was a gallery with an exhibition of photographs by francis wolff, the (jewish) blue note photographer. maybe they should have let another jewish architect build this building (moshe safdie? the ghost of louis kahn?).

-prenzlauerberg. this is the hip area with lots of good-looking restaurants, shops, vinyl stores, and general trendiness. at gabi's house i met a guy named gui who recently came to berlin from sao paulo. we walked around this neighborhood, ate some indian food, and ended up at a tiny thin movie theatre (about 30 seats) where we watched casablanca at midnight with german subtitles. an absolutely surreal highlight to me as an american.

-biking. i saw a lot of the city by bike, thanks to gabi's loan of hercules. it was very nice even though i had to stop and open my backpack to take a picture. so it constantly made me think about "is this worthwhile enough to stop and take a picture of?" and by the time i had finished that thought i was already past it or the moment was gone. but it isn't all about taking pictures.

-park sanssouci. this is in potsdam, south of berlin where the kaisers ruled their empire. it seemed like a french-inspired palatial garden, although i think it was constructed before versailles? it looked repressed in the winter time with no blooms and the statues in comical grey boxes to protect them from water damage. i walked around with gabi. we talked about what it was like when she moved to berlin in 1971 from a small town near the border with france. on the train she pointed out a checkpoint where people could move from west berlin to east berlin but you had to visit an office 3 times to get papers and stamps and you had to return to your side of the wall by midnight. this building is now a concert hall but it has the german word for tears in the name (i forget the german word).

-art. in addition to graffiti everywhere, the city is littered with galleries (not even including museums). there are frequent squats dedicated to art and the most famous and impressive one is the kunsthaus tacheles on friedrichstraße on the north side of the river. it looks like a bombed out mecca for crackheads but the arts are thriving there where artists have studios and gallery space on its 5 floors. i bet the parties there are intense. graffiti covers every surface and the stairwell has this delicious aroma that is a luxurious mix of piss, beer, and marijuana. i highly recommend wandering around this place for an hour or so. the art is so-so but the space and community it suggests are impressive.

-architecture. man there are a lot of important buildings in berlin. beyond the ones i already mentioned, i saw the peter behren's AEG turbine factory (1908 or so), an odd john hejduk housing complex (pictured above [why do his buildings always look like people?]), an early zaha hadid building (quite normal), gropius' bauhaus archive, the saarinen-like house of world art in the tiergarten, and others. there is a huge modernist housing block in the west part of the tiergarten with apartment buildings from everybody famous in mid-century european architecture, but mostly german and dutch architects. bakema, gropius, aalto, and my first oscar niemeyer building, a block set on tapering Y supports next to the staße des 17 juni. i also biked way too far west out of downtown through charlottenberg to see the berlin version of le corbusier's unite d'habitation. it is a titanic building, almost like a cruise ship propped up on pilotis. you can tell there are big apartments and little apartments and it has his signature man pressed into the concrete by the main entrance. a short note to the publishers of architecture guidebooks who are reading this blog: please make all of your neighborhood maps at the same scale if possible. it makes for more accurate estimations of biking distance, especially if you're not familiar with the city. i had to ride for like 45 minutes to get to this building but it didn't look that far on the map compared to other maps in the book. or at least include a scale on the maps so you know how they change. thanks. OK also the peter eisenman memorial was nice too, perhaps his best building (even though it isn't a building [this says something bad about his buildings]). right next to it was the frank gehry bank that still seemed to be under construction or something and was guarded by two politzei herren who looked at me with suspicion as i tried to enter the (locked) doors. i walked by the reichstag but never went in because it is something a tourist would do. the paul lobe house, split across the river, is also a nice work that reminds me of louis kahn.

-i finally learned what sound this character "ß" makes. the double S sound, who knew.

alright, enough. lets end here and just say that berlin is awesome and i need to come back. i didn't even hit all the neighborhoods of the city, missing the eastern canal part of kreuzberg and the hip student area of friedrichshain where the famous berghain club is. one of my friends here told me to go there at 9 am to see all the fucked up people still in the depths of their trip dancing the morning hours away. i missed out. maybe next time? i hope there is a next time soon. meanwhile, aufedersein berlin y hasta la proxima encuentra.

again, check the flickr for so many photos that you probably don't have the interest to browse through even a fraction of them. i know i don't.