Posts Tagged ‘Potsdamer Platz’
Renaissance in the Gemäldegalerie
In celebration of Slow Art Day, Kirsten Hall visits the Gemäldegalerie and focuses on three of her favourite Renaissance paintings... Renaissance wing of the Gemäldegalerie with the painting of St. Sebastian Berlin’s oft-overlooked Gemäldegalerie -- one of the assembly of museums, galleries and libraries that comprise Potsdamer Platz’s Kulturforum -- dates back to 1830 and hosts one of the world’s largest collections of European paintings from the 13th to the 18th [...]
A Walk Around Berlin’s Architecture
Architecture critic Rowan Moore takes a stroll around some of Berlin's best known buildings... Buildings, in Berlin, tend not to be just buildings. They are manifestos, propaganda, memorials, battlefields. It is the city whose Wall was one of the most political works of architecture of all time. The confrontation of superpowers was condensed into Berlin's urban form, and the apartment blocks in the old eastern and western halves are imprinted with competing ideologies. Nazism, Communism, [...]
A Tour Of r(Ostkreuz)
Sanna Akehurst takes a tour around one of her favourite Berlin train stations - Ostkreuz - as it finally undergoes renovations... "]So far as I know, Berlin is streets ahead in terms of exploiting something called Construction Tourism. The first well-known example is the elevated box that showed visitors what Potsdamer Platz was going to look like. The in-progress new international airport (BER Airport Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt) has a visitor's tower and various tours to admire its [...]
Rocking Remembrance
Does Berlin need another memorial that simulates historical experience? No, argues Dr. Karl Schlögel, who suggests the city should take itself "a little more seriously"... In 2009 the Bundestag launched a public competition to design a memorial to Freedom and Unity, in memory of the peaceful revolution in the GDR and German reunification. The winning design by Stuttgart designer Johannes Milla and Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz is due to be erected on Berlin's [...]
12 Ways To Avoid Valentine’s Day in Berlin
Here at Slow Travel Berlin we believe in love. But while the city's lovers and romantics will find plenty of ways to enjoy Valentine's Day in the city, there are others who won't be drowning in roses and chocolate hearts. Ruth Michaelson offers 12 ideas for singles, incurable un-romantics and those simply not into love's most commercial event... 1. Go to a "Fuck Valentine's Day" Party If there’s one time guaranteed to make the whole world look like it’s Noah’s Ark, where [...]
Book Review: Berlin by David Clay Large
Paul Scraton takes a closer look at David Clay Large's fantastic history of the city... “What Potsdamer Platz resembles is an edge city; one of those private, development-driven urbanoid clusters that have sprouted up across the American landscape in recent years. It is reassuring that the new Potsdamer Platz is notably without nationalist expressions. The downside of this is that the place could be anywhere. Like other edge cities, it occupies a kind of nebulous international airport [...]
City Lit: Kurfürstendamm
Suzi from Packabook.com throws away her guidebook to explore one of Berlin's most famous streets via two novels... One of the great joys of reading books set in the city you're visiting is the way they can help you understand your surroundings. I like to read novels as if they're maps - keys to places I've not yet unlocked. Some people like guide books...I'd rather read a novel. I think I'm right in saying that for most non-German speakers, the street names in Berlin can be a bit [...]
