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Berlin, Germany
I'm ready, ready for the crush
The once the future center of Berlin, Potsdamer Platz once had a wall (yes, that wall) running through it. Years later, most of the forest of construction cranes has given way to what could best be described as a fake city. Still, even a fake city can have its charms. Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz (designed by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn) is a series of nice enough buildings surrounding a central plaza- fountains and lights and life underneath a wonderful open air glass and fabric and steel roof.
It's the roof again, this time with slightly better light protecting all from a cold and persistent rain.
It's back to the classics at the timeless though New National Gallery in Berlin. Designed by famous dead guy Mies van der Rohe and temporarily home to a flashing red text ceiling, its own reflection, a wayward tour group and, well, not much else.
Central to (just about) everything you want to see, the expansive Tiergarten remains deep in old West Berlin, just two stops down the line (actually only one) from Zoo Station. At the center of this never ending park a monument to a lost past sits atop a landmark, occupiable column. For only a few euro, you too can climb its spiral stair to just below those golden feet to a place where you can survey the endless trees and that distant, emerging city.
Another one of my favorite pictures, this time a blurry self portrait from the roof of the Reichstag, where the clouds and sun of a rainy morning reflect back to Sir Norman Foster's ever so fun dome.
Inside the big glass dome at the all too historic Reichstag where a giant sunscreen protects all from a giant, distant sun.
If this building looks slightly familiar, you may remember it as a star of a slide show three years ago when it was brand new in an unfinished city. Inside, three years later, the glass and mirrors and ramps still provide enough distraction from visitors to allow the hard working Bundestag just a floor below to finish whatever hard work it is that they actually do.
Built by the 1800s by the fun loving Kaisers, burned down by Hitler in the 1930s, bombed senseless and occupied by the Soviet Red Army in the 1940s, rebuilt by Norman Foster in the late 1990s- it seems that just about everyone loves the Reichstag.
I know I send a lot of pictures of Norman Foster's dome, but it's so damn impressive in person I find myself losing any (perceived) self control. Sorry.
To enter the dome, you walk across the edges of the Tiergarten, get in line and wait. After a lengthy and thorough security process, you ascend in a glass elevator to a roof where you suddenly find yourself outside. From there the dome and its glass and mirrors and ramps are only a few fateful steps away.
This is what you see from the roof- a few German flags, all of Berlin and a big glass dome, constantly straddled with its damn omnipresent window wash apparatus.
