‘Design & Architecture’ Archives
Do You Read Me?!
Carlijn Potma browses Berlin's most comprehensive magazine store... Auguststrasse - East Berlin’s so called ‘art mile’ - doesn't only host a widerange of art galleries. It’s also a great place to hunt for rare books and magazines thanks to No. 28, which houses Do You Read Me?!, a well-known store offering hundreds of interesting magazines and reading material. Graphic designer Mark Kiessling and professional bookseller Jessica Reitz founded the store two and a half years [...]
Following Berlin’s Paper Trail…
Giulia Pines explores the city's burgeoning stationery scene... Nowadays, it can seem like an act of defiance to pick up pen and paper. What were once the writing haunts of wistful young dreamers and published authors alike have turned sterile, as laptops on café tables announce the professions of their owners and only the click-click-click of the keys marks time. An activity that used to be languid, leisurely, and above all egalitarian has been fully transformed. Now it is about [...]
Hauptbahnhof: the non-kiez
Berlin resident Giulia Pines reflects on the strangeness of living in a neighbourhood that's not quite a neighbourhood... How does one write about a neighborhood that is not a neighbourhood? A neighbourhood still so much under construction one cannot even use that well-worn phrase “not so much a neighbourhood as a state of mind” (“not of an age but for all time”?) to describe it? A neighbourhood whose future identity is still so much in question, we are awoken day and night by [...]
Café Einstein
Joseph Pearson of Berlin Memory Blog explores ghosts and Apfelstrudel at Berlin's Café Einstein... You love this Viennese-styled café, but at times it fills you with grief. You were here in late autumn and the garden was empty. Darkening days and changing light, and you can't help but imagine ghosts. Jittery coffee nerves too, cup on cup of Wiener Mélange, and an Apfelstrudel sugar-high. No wonder you're on edge. Imagine no tables in the garden, a woman passing between the [...]
Berghain & Panorama Bar
Luis-Manuel Garcia profiles one of Berlin's most prominent techno institutions... Berghain: a nightclub that has become an institution of the Berlin techno scene, also taking on mythical proportions in the global techno and house scenes. The club is in fact a reincarnation of an earlier Berlin nightclub, Ostgut (1998-2003), which was located in the empty Ostgüterbahnhof railway shipping warehouse near the Ostbahnhof S-Bahn/railway station in the Friedrichshain district (in former [...]
Christiane F. & The Gropiusstadt
Sanna Akehurst visits Gropiusstadt to pay tribute to Christiane F’s Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo... There's a German author and cabaret artist by the name of Horst Evers who once suggested that if any of your acquaintances outside Berlin has the audacity to take your invitation to the city seriously and then insists you show them the sights, you should show them the view out of your flat window and ask them to kindly keep quiet so you can sleep off the rest of your hangover. I wouldn't [...]
39 things you might learn if you visit the Stasi Museum with a 10½ week old baby…
Adam Butler pays a visit to the Stasi Museum with his new baby, and learns a few things along the way... 1. That the word barrierefrei when used in reference to e.g. U-Bahn stations, rather than meaning that there are no barriers and you therefore don’t have to buy a ticket, actually means that this is theoretically a place that you can traverse with a pram, wheelchair, broken-hipped aunt, etc. without having to worry about stairs; and that although the nearest station to the Stasi Museum [...]
Kino Babylon
William Thirteen pays tribute to one of Berlin's oldest and best-loved cinemas... When the Kino Babylon opened its doors in Spring of 1929 Berliners couldn't complain of a shortage of cinemas. If anything, there was a surplus. The Reichs-Kino-Addressbuch of that year gave the official count as 378, and there were already film palaces at Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Tor, as well as innumerable "flea cinemas" in nearby Münzstrasse. But by a fortuitous coincidence of urban planning and [...]
Liquidrom
William Thirteen gets pampered at one of Berlin's most unique spas... Anyone who spends much time here soon realises that Berlin is the three-toed sloth in the zoo of European capitals. While the denizens of London and Paris race about their cities, pressing past each other like anxious antelope on a headlong rush to high-rent, fashionably-appointed dooms, Berliners are hard pressed to tear themselves away from that second Milchkaffee before happy hour - and then only to wander off to [...]
The Badeschiff
Looking to beat the summer heat? Try Berlin's Badeschiff - a swimming pool in the Spree... Badeschiff - literally "bathing ship" - opened in 2004 as an art project organized by Berlin's Stadtkunstprojekte (City Art ProjectSociety), the AMP Architectos (Teneriffa), architect Gil Wilk and local artist Susanne Lorenz.The initial aim was to enliven city life along what was then a long-neglected stretch of the Spree, between the former Osthafen (East harbour) and Flutgraben, a small [...]
