Day 1 6/5/12
After arriving in Berlin and getting settled, we went on a
quick tour of the city and walked along the Spree and talked briefly about some
of the iconic buildings nearby. While looking at one of the government buildings
(with a large, open circle in one of its external walls), Mr. Caldwell
explained that structures with large, geometrical shapes cut out were examples
of the rationalism architectural movement. We later went by a Fire/Police Station
built in 2004. The building was designed by German architects Sauerbruch and
Hutton as a modern extension of an existing 19th century building.
The façade of the new structure is composed of large colored-glass paneling
that may be opened and closed to control airflow in the building; the green and
red coloring represent the colors of Germany’s police and fire brigades.
Day 2 6/5/12
Today we covered primarily architecture topics. Berlin is a
centre of modern architecture for various reasons, one of which being that
Berlin was largely destroyed and damaged during WWII and the subsequent
occupations. The reconstruction period that followed Berlin being named as the
capital of the newly reunited East and West Germanies gave opportunity for
pushing Berlin’s image and structure into a new modern period expressed through
contemporary buildings.
Early in the morning we proceeded to Pariser Platz, the
location of the famous Brandenburg gate and home to the American and French
embassies. The buildings to take note of, however, would be the Academy of Art
Berlin and the DZ Bank buildings. The first is interesting based on the
calamity of the inside, with metal, glass, and wood thrown together in a
seemingly haphazard manor to construct a building. The result is baffling.
The DZ Bank building was one of my favorites. You walk in
the doors and it seems like it should be a normal office building, but walking
further you are able to look through a wooden archway to see…
Interesting contrasts to these two buildings were their
simple facades. During reconstruction, “eaves heights had to be 22 meters, and
buildings had to have a proper termination against the sky. Stone cladding was
to be used as far as possible.” This was quoted form Wikipedia for phrasing,
but essentially the buildings were dictated not to be too extravagant or
exciting on the outside so that their presence wouldn’t take away from the
glory of the Brandenburg Gate.
After this we walked along the previous path of the Berlin
wall to a section of formerly East Germany where part of the wall is set up on
display, next to a simple metal pole and placard marking the location where the
first part of the wall was torn down.
My favorite part of the day was after lunch when we went to
the Berlin Philharmonic. It was an immense structure with both a larger and
smaller concert hall, designed and built in the 60’s and completed in the 80’s.
Both concert halls were golden, asymmetrical, tent-like, pentagon shaped, and
clearly astounding for their architectural significance. I, however, was
distracted from this by the musicians practicing in the halls (doing so for the
pleasure of using the building’s astounding acoustics). The first group,
practicing in the small concert hall, was a string ensemble and the second, in
the large hall, was an orchestra featuring an Italian singer. We snuck in to
listen to a few songs of each, all of which was utterly fantastic. The philharmonic gives free lunchtime concerts every Tuesday, so hopefully we'll be able to make some of those before we leave.
Here’s a picture of the epic covering type things of the
shopping center/plaza that I ate lunch in. Goulash (soup) is good.
Day 3 6/6/12
Today was history, generally sticking to 1200-1400.
Essentially what we learned was that Berlin was rather isolated from
Christianity and the (possibly subsequently) intellectual developments of Western
Europe, meaning that many of the structure and developments were rather later
in coming to Berlin. One of the sites we visited was the remains of a
Franciscan Monastery. Almost 3 of its 4 walls were still standing, and the
absent wall was replaced by a rather evil looking wrought-iron fence to keep
out trespassers. The other odd thing about this structure was that an abundance
of rather questionable modern art sculptures had been placed inside the open
grounds of the former Monastery.
We visited the monument to the May 10th, 1933 book
burnings.
Another
interesting site we visited today was St. Hedwig's Cathedral, built in the 18th
century. It is a round cathedral, patterned after the Pantheon, with a large
domed roof and stairways leading down into an underground room with and alter
and some other private rooms. But what really made it interesting was the organ
player. You could begin to hear the 'music' right as we walked up to the door,
and it took me a moment to realize that no, no it is not good. The man on the
organ was playing the entire time we looked around and the noise resounded
throughout the church hauntingly. I cannot begin to properly describe the vibe.
The music had lots of long, melodious deep notes, typical of an organ, but was
interspersed with high pitched notes played with no musically appealing order.
The entire church was given an unnatural, creepy, and dark feel. I felt odd
attempting to smile for pictures while listening to such haunting (and not in a
good way) sounds. Bizzare place.
From
there we proceeded to another cathedral designed by Karl Freidrich Schinkel, a
prominent German architect of the 19th century, which had been turned into the
Schinkel museum. What made this building stand out was that they ran out of
funding after designing and thus were unable to use marble or brick or any of
their desired building materials, so instead they painted all the walls to look
like marble and the ceiling to look like perfectly laid pink brick, with
additional cross supports painted in with such detail I had to double take to
realize that it was artificial. Very gothic styled, with truly beautiful
stained glass windows. We then proceeded to the Grendlskfr square before
disbanding (my phone/camera went MIA at this point).
Later that night, while wandering near the Brandenburg gate,
I sat for a while and listened to a British guy (news caster? Historian?) film
a piece on the gate. Did you know that the statue on the top of the gate
represents Victory, the Roman goddess? Or that the statue was taken
by Napoleon with him back to Paris after having defeated the Prussians?
Prussian didn’t get it back till 1814.
Day 4 6/7/12
Today we toured the Memorial to
Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism and the Memorial to the murdered Jews of
Europe (and attached museum). Words cannot describe.
We walked through the tiergarten after lunch. It’s beautiful
and extensive; parks are glorious. We made our way to the Haus der Kulturen der
Welt (the House of the Cultures of the World), build in the late 50’s by an
American architect. I cannot show you a picture, but imagine an orange and
white building shaped loosely like the Startrek insignia. On the inside it
quickly became my favorite place. Once making our way inside, Katie and I
followed the sound of tribal music to a large box-like room sitting inside the
massive foyer. We entered a hallway leading into complete darkness with the
tribal music getting louder with every step. Eventually we were in complete
darkness with drums so loud I could hear nothing else. We came to the end of
the short hallway and began to turn into the room, and then I can not quite
describe the thoughts rushing through my head (again, it was pitch black and
too loud to hear): essentially, we simultaneously decided that there could be a
room full of people sitting in the room that we were barging in on. We ran.
Once outside, we ran into Dr. Stuckey and some of our class mates and decided
to make a second venture (they were mocking us for running, which was perfectly
acceptable from the outside, but I feel that if they’d been in the same
situation they might have gotten uncomfortable as well). We reentered the room
to find an empty, pitch-black room with blaring tribal music and a large
screen. The screen then played the best video, which was essentially 5 to 10
minutes of an angler fish swimming to the drumbeat slowly panning out to a view
of two men dancing. It reminded me strongly of the music video for Lonely Boys
by the black keys. I cannot convey how awesome it was, so you’re going to have
to trust me.
We then walked to the Victory column, first constructed in
1873 to originally commemorate the Prussian victory in the Danish-Prussian War,
but during construction they gained a victory over the French so the column
came to signify that victory as well.
The column was later moved by the Nazi’s to its present location on the
edge of the teirgarten. We climbed to the top (around 300 winding steps) for an
expansive, panoramic view of the city.
Also, we played on a giant jungle gym made entirely of
(steel) rope. It was cool.
Day 5 6/8/12
Today we took a S-ban to Potsdam, that dreaded place I’ll be
visiting next week. It was really cool. We started off the day by looking at
the Einstein Tower constructed in the early 20th century. It is
still an active research base so we were unable to go inside.
From there we proceeded to the Sanssouci Park/Gardens. As we
sat in the shade of a large tree next to the great fountain, Dr. Stuckey Sanssouci
is the former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia. The palace
was build, as was popular at that time, in the style of the French Palace of
Versailles surrounded by glorious gardens as far as the eye can see. A little further
in the gardens was the Orangarie palace, which was also incredibly cool
looking.
That’s really all for that day information wise, because it
was really a look and see how cool/beautiful this place is kind of thing. Would
show you a picture, but you know, no camera. Internet it. Then imagine that,
but with way better weather than anything. It was seriously beautiful outside
that day….
Speaking of cameras, we ended this day by arduously navigating
the German train system to go and meet with the nice old couple who found my
phone a few days ago and retrieved it!
END EVERY DAY WITH FRIENDSHIP!!!!
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