In Case You’re Wondering...

...what Ost-Berlin Mitte looked like in the 80’s, it looked like Ost-Berlin Mitte in the 50’s. That is, if you just scratched the surface and got away from the Potemkin village near the Fernsehturm.

You've Gotta Look Busy

If I could rename all those “International” Geneva-based institutions anything, I would call them the “Fake-Crisis Emergency Management Center”

Building Design and the Capital of the Berlin Republic

Which is to say, Berlin, but I digress. Jim Hudson’s excellent blog visits Mitte, with photos that transit work from the 1933 to the present, visiting momentarily the flour that grew in the faded husk of the pride and joy of the DDR, trotting down the entirely “destalinized” Doreteenstraße.

Now, it should be noted that German architecture during the period 1933-45 is a complex business, with perhaps more continuity than many of the stripped neoclassical ‘banality of evil’ designs would suggest, albeit that modernism was relegated relegated to industrial buildings, where it survived at all. And one should not forget the need to consider the context of the buildings and the horrors of the regime, to avoid becoming one of those weird people with an unhealthy obsession with the subject. But, well, ooh, I love a good Nazi building, don’t you?

Euros to donuts, I agree, but atuill have a hard time thinking that one can express it openly without gimballing my neck to see who’s listening.