Posts Tagged Travel
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 7, 2011
Foster and Partners unveil a natty new airport and winsome winery, France builds a museum for lost soldiers, and Camden Town says farewell to the TV-am building
At its best, architecture should set our sights high and lift the spirit. It can do this physically as well as metaphorically, as projects announced this week demonstrate. Foster and Partners has unveiled designs for the new Kuwait airport. This is centred on an elegant terminal in the guise of a giant trefoil, with each of its three curving facades measuring three-quarters of a mile long. Imagine looking down on it from an aircraft window through azure desert skies: it will seem rather like a three-winged Frisbee – you could almost pick it up and send it spinning across the dunes.
From the ground, the new terminal has echoes of the soaring TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy airport, designed by Eero Saarinen. Its great single roof will be both a huge parasol and a bed for solar panels. Inside, daylight will be filtered through slits, chutes and slants, while cascades of water will keep passengers cool. With few changes in floor level, soaring concrete vaults and shady arcades, and with a spirit of flight encoded in its architectural DNA, this should be one of the world's most convincing new airport buildings.
In France, the spirit of thousands of Australian soldiers killed in what was their first major engagement on the Western Front during the first world war is to be honoured with the creation of the Museum of the Battle of Fromelles. Announced this week, the competition-winning designs by Paris and New York-based Serero Architects reveal a shrine-like, octagonal concrete building dug into the hill where the soldiers fought, and alongside the cemetery where they lie.
The mass graves of the soldiers, machine-gunned down in this spot by German troops on 19-20 July 1916, were discovered in 2008. The cemetery was opened last year, and now this thoughtful museum will tell the story of a largely forgotten episode in the first world war. Adolf Hitler, serving with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, took part in the battle, as did WH "Jimmy" Downing who, some years ago, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, crisscrossed lattice of death, and hundreds were mown down in a flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb." There were 1,500 British and more than 5,000 Australian casualties. The architect's aim is to take visitors on a journey through darkness and death to light and life.
Coop Himmelblau, the blue-sky-thinking Austrian architects, have just completed a vast cinema complex in Busan, the South Korean port city, home to Asia's biggest cinema event, the Busan international film festival which opened yesterday. The underside of the cinema's wave-like cantilevered roof – the world's largest – can be used like a vast public screen. Hopefully no director will ever be tempted to remake Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but if they were to, Coop Himmelblau's mind-blowing complex would make a suitably mesmerising backdrop.
Winners of RIBA's Forgotten Spaces 2011 competition, an initiative to raise the design stakes of overlooked corners of Greater London, will be announced at the launch of an exhibition at Somerset House on 19 October. Meanwhile, you can take a peep at the shortlisted entries here. Ideas from architects, designers and local groups include artist-inhabited church spires across London, a city farm alongside Croydon's mainline railway station and event spaces on the rooftops of Bethnal Green tower blocks.
The former TV-am studios, designed by Terry Farrell and opened in 1983, did much to brighten a shadowy canalside corner of Camden Town. Sadly, this playful PoMo building is currently being torn apart and remodelled in the dullest possible corporate manner, especially at a time when PoMo is being celebrated at the V&A. While TV-am was never great architecture and was never intended to last long, it was a cheery creation with an entertaining stage-set interior. It was too young to have been listed, but if a building has to go – for whatever reason – it should be replaced by something better. This hasn't happened here.
And finally, while teetotallers will tut, RIBA has announced a "sociable night with a difference": Drink Architecture. I don't think the idea is to see architecture through the wrong end of a wine bottle, but the first event in London (with Foster and Partners's Jaime Valle discussing the three-winged design of the Faustino winery in Spain's Ribero del Duro region, followed by an explanation of the wines stored there as you taste them) sounds appealing. And if your spirits are suitably raised, visits to the winery, 90 or so miles north of Madrid, can be arranged. And no, Fosters haven't designed Madrid airport.
Spain’s €44m Niemeyer centre is shut in galleries glut
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2011
Squabble over spending on hotels, trips and meals at complex designed by celebrated Brazilian architect
A dazzling €44 million (£37.7m) arts centre in the northern Spanish city of Avilés is to close after six months amid political squabbling as the country asks itself what to do with a glut of glittering new museums.
The Niemeyer centre, which was designed by the celebrated 103-year-old Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, was intended to have the same impact on the industrial Cantabrian sea port as the Guggenheim museum has had on Bilbao, 150 miles to the east.
As Spain tries to digest the museums and arts centres designed by world-famous architects during the boom years of public investment in culture of the past two decades, a new regional government has forced the centre to shut its doors for at least the next two months.
The last show, featuring a piece choreographed by flamenco dancer Maria Pagés, will be on Saturday. Recent sellouts at the centre included a Richard III directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey.
Several thousand people took to the streets on Sunday in a display of support for an arts centre that locals hoped would put the city on the global culture map. But the regional government of Asturias, which owns the buildings and part finances the centre, forced the closure, alleging "serious irregularities" in the accounts.
"Receipts and invoices needed to justify some of the spending are absent," said regional culture chief Emilio Marcos, who alleged that too much had been spent on hotels, trips and restaurants.
Administrators said they were "shocked and perplexed" by the accusations, claiming the "very modest" €900,000 annual budget had been stretched a long way. "It has transformed the city, multiplying the number of tourists by four and acting as a spur for the local economy," they said.
Although politicians say the Niemeyer will not become an empty white elephant, its name can be added to a growing list of ambitious publicly-funded projects in Spain which have run into trouble.
They include not only arts centres and museums, but also airports and high-speed railway stations planned during the bonanza period before Spain's economy slumped three years ago.
Some have become burdens simply because they cost so much to maintain. The Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia recently highlighted a raft of small local theatres, libraries and other amenities that have closed because they are too expensive to run.
The Niemeyer brought in big names, though not always to do the things they are most famous for. Woody Allen came to play jazz, film director Julian Schnabel exhibited his Polaroids, while the actor Jessica Lange has shown her photographs. Critics claim that it has concentrated too much on celebrities, but the centre has proved a draw for locals and out-of-towners.
Among those protesting on Sunday were hoteliers and restaurateurs, who see the Niemeyer as a key driver for local business. "I believe the Niemeyer has become a first-class engine for the economy and we are not going to waste the things that give us wealth," mayoress Pilar Varela said.
White elephants
• City of Culture, Santiago de Compostela
Construction of two of the six buildings for a huge culture campus in the capital city of the Galicia region has been postponed indefinitely. The cost of the scheme, designed by Peter Eisenman, is €300m (£257m) so far.
• Huesca airport
Built four years ago at a cost of €40m to bring tourists to the northern province's ski resorts, it received just four commercial passenger flights in the three months to August.
• AVE train station, Guadalajara
Only 60 passengers a day use the high-speed trains at this station built in farmland six miles from the Madrid dormitory city of Guadalajara. Commuters say the service is too expensive and too far out of town.
• Castellón airport
Formally inaugurated in March, with a promise that it would start receiving passengers by September, this €150m airport on the east coast has now put back its first commercial flights to April next year at the earliest.
Marlowe theatre: curtain rises on Canterbury’s £25.6m revamp
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 28, 2011
Glittering inaugural programme to include everything from Philharmonia Orchestra and Shakespeare to Peppa Pig
The tourists drifting past in boats on the river Stour didn't realise it, but the music they could just hear in the distance was the very first performance in Canterbury's brand new £25.6m Marlowe theatre. Appropriately (for a building in which the first year's programming finds space for Peppa Pig, the 84-strong Philharmonia Orchestra, Peter Pan on Ice and Glyndebourne touring opera), mezzo soprano Rosie Aldridge sang arias from Bizet, Saint Saëns and Gilbert and Sullivan.
The archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has been in for an approving look – the uncompromisingly modern theatre, surrounded by medieval listed buildings, is clearly visible from the tower of the cathedral, and the view of the cathedral spectacularly fills an entire window in the theatre – but very few of the townspeople have had a chance to see what their taxes were spent on.
At a time when every local authority in the country is slashing culture and other budgets to the bone, the council raised most of the money for the new theatre, and will also own and operate it – and predicts firmly that it will generate more money spent in the area in the first year than they have invested, along with hundreds of direct and indirect jobs.
"We did intend to have a fortnight of just inviting people in for a look, but we ran out of time," Janice McGuinness, head of culture at Canterbury council, said – shouting to make herself heard over the din of drilling and hammering. The stage lighting was still being rigged, and it was impossible to get Aldridge's grand piano into the auditorium, and so the foyer became an impromptu recital space.
The theatre will be opened by Prince Edward (once famously a theatre-company tea boy) on 4 October 2011, and has just announced the first year's programme. Theatre director Mark Everett is bursting with pride over the Philharmonia residency – the first in Kent by a major symphony orchestra; their first concerts are already sold out – and Glyndebourne adding Canterbury to its tour in 2012, but also promises that Cinderella, the first pantomime, will be properly spectacular: "I'm allowed to have a lot to do with that, it's my treat of the year," he said.
There will also be a new show from the Canadian aerial circus company Éloize, Northern Ballet's Nutcracker and the Rambert dance company, Henry V and The Winter's Tale from Propeller, Edward Hall's acclaimed Shakespeare company, big touring musicals including Grease, and the premiere of a new production of Top Hat.
The new theatre, designed by Keith Williams, is actually smaller in volume than the old Marlowe, a 1930s converted Odeon, but has 1,200 bright orange leather-covered seats, 250 more than the old building, and a big enough orchestra pit, backstage space and fly tower to take in major touring musicals, opera and ballet. There is also a 150-seat studio space, where the choreographer Richard Alston will be working with the cathedral choir to create a new piece, A Ceremony of Carols.
For Everett, the moment of highest drama was the night in 2009 when the council finally voted to go for it, not only to flatten the old building but buy the car showroom next door so the site could spill on to the river bank. Everett first came to the Marlowe in 1994. The new theatre takes its eclectic programming from the tatty but much-loved old building, but in the barn-like space the cheapest seats were so far from the stage they might as well have been in the next county.
"Nothing that has happened since has been as scary as that moment," Everett recalled. "The old building was falling to pieces around us, and up to the last minute it was by no means certain which way the vote would go. We'd have made the old building work somehow – the one thing all theatres have is unlimited supplies of gaffer tape and black emulsion. But this is a dream come true."
Sagrada Familia gets final completion date – 2026 or 2028
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 23, 2011
Barcelona's intricate temple to God to be ready for centenary of architect Antoni Gaudí's death … or thereabouts
• Catch up on the history of Barcelona's architectural wonder
Barcelona's emblematic Sagrada Familia church finally has a completion date — 2026 or 2028, more than 140 years after it was started.
Joan Rigol, president of the committee charged with finishing the building by Antoni Gaudí, said it should be finished in time for the centenary for the architect's death – or, if not, two years later.
Five huge towers are being added to the eccentric building, which is among Spain's most-visited tourist attractions.
Gaudí died in 1926 after being runover by the city's No 30 tram. He had been living on the Sagrada Familia building site and looked so impoverished that it took several hours for doctors to realise who he was. The tram driver thought he had hit a drunken tramp.
Originally paid for by subscription, the church was always set to take a long time to build. "My client is in no hurry," Gaudí once said, referring to God.
The building was at one stage popularly known as "the cathedral of the poor" and Gaudi himself was known to go begging for contributions – which currently amount to around €500,000 (£440,000) a year.
An influx of tourists, along with modern masonry techniques, has seen work speed up considerably over the past two decades. Some three million fee-paying tourists are expected to visit this year alone, contributing €30m.
With a roof finally in place, Pope Benedict was able to consecrate it as a basilica last year. But a setback came when a man set fire to the basilica's sacristy in April, with repair work still under way.
"The damage is worse than we had thought," said the building's chief architect, Jordi Bonet. Authorities are now considering installing metal detectors at the entrance.
"Our new objective is to complete the six central towers, of which five have already been started," said Rigol.
The sixth tower will measure 170 metres and contain a lift to carry tourists to the top. Rigol added that a high-speed rail tunnel to be built nearby, which has been approved by the courts, may still damage the buildings foundations.
Bonet did not seem so sure about the finish date. "I'm not saying that it is wrong, I hope it is not, but it is not that simple. This is a very complex work and needs a lot of investigation," the architect told the RAC1 radio station. "Everyone has the best will, but I cannot give any assurances."
Are Hollywood and high art still compatible?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 20, 2011
Tinseltown has majestic monuments of the silent era, reminding us of a time when American film and art co-existed. Is that golden age gone forever?
The detritus of artistic ambition lies all over Hollywood like a wreckage of broken dreams. Grauman's Egyptian theatre on Hollywood Boulevard may sound like just another tourist stop, between the Walk of Fame and Universal City, but it is so much stranger than that. The Egyptian opened in 1922 as a temple of imagination and aspiration. Meticulously restored and now used to show independent films by the American Cinematheque, it oozes a serious attitude to cinema.
The Egyptian theatre defies all the cliches of Hollywood vulgarity. Yes, it is over the top – very – but not in the crass, tawdry way beloved by European stereotypes of American culture. On the contrary: it speaks of passion, idealism, and sincerity. Like the Neoclassicists of the 18th century, Sid Grauman built his cinema in meticulous homage to an ancient Egyptian temple. In its forecourt, convincing mythological scenes and hieroglyphs are painted on massive blocks of yellow stone. The portico is supported by bulbous columns that seem copied from Napoleon's epic Description of Egypt. All this demands from filmgoers an attitude of awe and reverence: the religious architecture tells you the film showing inside must have the sublimity of some divine revelation.
Meanwhile, near Sunset Boulevard a half-timbered Tudor facade has survived among the motels, drive-ins and health clubs. Who, in the early years of the 20th century, sought to remember or flaunt his British origins by decorating his studio like an Elizabethan manor house? Charlie Chaplin, that's who. Today his studio is owned, and its historic exterior maintained, by the Jim Henson company, and on the roof stands Kermit the Frog dressed as Charlie.
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This was once a temple to art: in films from The Immigrant to The Gold Rush, Chaplin built on his balletic slapstick genius to create realistic, poetic visions of the modern world that fascinated the European avant garde as much as they delighted the box office. For his art film Ballet Mécanique, the painter Fernand Leger created a dancing Cubist "Charlot" puppet. By 1929, Dali and Bunuel would transfigure the language of film comedy in their surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou.
The eerie monuments of the silent era that still linger in Hollywood are reminders of an age when American film and high art seemed to be compatible. Is that golden age gone forever? It looks that way, when you notice hoardings around Hollywood for new releases like a prequel to the remake of The Thing – one previewer doesn't even appear to know the John Carpenter version was derived from a 1950s original.
Yet on the plane home, the films included The Tree of Life. In its extreme visual beauty and emotional grandeur, Terrence Malick's film resembles some legendary "artistic" effort of the silent age, with the addition of gorgeous colour. As he gets older, Malick seems less and less interested in dialogue, reducing his actors' speeches more than ever to tortuous inner voices, while the visual richness tells us all we need to know.
American film has always existed on the borderland of art and trash, and it has its geniuses today just as in the days when expectant crowds filed reverently into the Egyptian to worship the flickering gods of light.
The wild and beautiful Lake District’s ‘serenely sane, practical and rational homes’
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 19, 2011
The Northerner's arts ambassador Alan Sykes pads round an exhibition about two architects who dreaded what Victorian furniture would do to their austerely lovely work.
Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and Charles Voysey were leading followers of Philip Webb as arts & crafts architect-designers in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Both men designed houses near Lake Windermere in the Lake District. In Baillie Scott's case, Blackwell has been restored to its former glory by the Lakeland Arts Trust (the people who run Kendal's Abbot Hall Art Gallery) and now stands proudly above the eastern side of the lake, boasting an impressive series of temporary exhibitions, including this one. The Yorkshireman Voysey's Broad Leys, a couple of miles up the lake, is now the home of the Windermere Motor Boat Racing Club, and can also be used as a luxury guest house.
Baillie Scott said, in a phrase which would probably irk some of the more extravagant contemporary architects, "the claims of commonsense are paramount".
Broad Leys shows its L shape and its great windows open to the west over Windermere, and also the meticulous attention to the finest detail that marked both architects – there is even a cast iron ventilation grille which somebody has adapted to use as a trivet. The normally curmudgeonly Pevsner was clearly a fan, describing it as Voysey's masterpiece and adding that it is "overlooking Windermere, with … three distinct large curved bay windows stretching from the ground to the first floor, providing magnificent views over the lake."
Blackwell reminds us how lucky the Lakeland Arts Trust was with how much of the original interior survived its period as a girls' school and as offices – we can even see the original keys and coat-hooks. The quality of the building and its setting have long been acknowledged – the German architect Hermann Muthesius described Blackwell as '…one of the most attractive creations that the new movement in house-building has produced' and credited Baillie Scott with the 'new idea of the interior as an autonomous work of art...each room is an individual creation."
Both architects were keen that their vision would not stop with the physical structure of their buildings, but would go down to the smallest details of fittings and furnishings – as Baillie Scott put it: "every architect who loves his work must have his enthusiasm dampened by a prophetic vision of the hideous furniture with which his client will fill his rooms." He and Voysey got round this by having "formed styles of their own in room decoration, designing everything necessary, from chairs and tables to carpets, wall-papers and window-curtains" – they even designed inkwells and clocks - and both men hated extravagant ornamentation: as Voysey put it, in a domestic interior "we cannot be too simple." His near contemporary Lutyens said: "No detail was too small for Voysey's volatile brain, and it was not so much his originality – though original he was – as his consistency that proved a source of such delight"
The mediaevalism of the arts and crafts movement influenced the size of the rooms: at Blackwell the great entrance hall even includes a minstrels' gallery – although the huge copper light fittings which would have hung over a billiards table do not strike a very Tudor note.
Baillie Scott, a few years younger than Voysey, was clearly an admirer and influenced by his work. In a generous tribute in "The Studio" magazine in 1907, he wrote "If one were asked to sum up in a few words the scope and purposes of Mr. Voysey's work, one might say that it consists mainly in the application of serenely sane, practical and rational ideas to home making… And this beauty … is a beauty of which we will never tire and which is above the changing whims of fashion. Our modern public buildings, which are designed merely to impress the vulgar with histrionic and meaningless architectural features, fail to achieve even this unworthy aim."
Seeing the breadth and vision of the two architects, especially seeing it within the context of the masterpiece of one of them, makes one realize quite how narrow and shoddy most "design and build" contemporary architecture is.
MH Baillie Scott and CFA Voysey, the Lake District and beyond: Arts & Crafts Houses and Furnishings is on at Blackwell, Bowness-on-Windermere, until October 30th.
Open House: take a nosey around some of London’s most interesting buildings – in pictures
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 8, 2011
A record 784 London buildings and public spaces will be showcased in next weekend's (17-18 September) Open House, a celebration of the capital's architecture. Here's a small taster of what you'll be able to see
Blackpool visitors to enjoy high life again as tower reopens
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 28, 2011
Tourism bosses hope to lure families to Lancashire resort with attractions including Blackpool Dungeon and tower-top skywalk
Above the garish buildings on Blackpool's promenade looms the grand old tower, a 117-year-old oxblood red metal beacon that is once again causing excitement in England's most famous seaside resort.
The 158 metre (518ft – and nine inches) tower, famously modelled on the Eiffel tower, reopens this week after a year-long £5m revamp. Inside, intricate metalwork is being uncovered as an old cafe becomes a gourmet burger restaurant – the flock red wallpaper replaced by a modern design.
On Thursday, the skywalk, complete with floor-to-ceiling glass observational panel, will be launched as part of the newly named Blackpool Tower Eye, giving views of the three Victorian piers, the Fylde coast and, on a good day, Manchester, the Lakes and Scotland.
The tower will be lit up on Friday, the day the illuminations are switched on, and will be visible for 30 miles up the coast.
An aquarium on ground level, meanwhile, has been turned into Blackpool Dungeon – a Lancashire version of the London Dungeon with actors performing 10 vignettes telling tales of smugglers, Pendle witches, the plague and Vikings.
Visitor numbers to Blackpool in 2010 were up by a million to 13m. Tourism is worth £1bn, supporting 20,000 jobs.
Blackpool council estimates the revamp will attract an extra 800,000 visitors a year to the tower, almost double the current total of about 458,000. This would also bring additional visitor spending of £36m.
Iain Hawkins, of Merlin Entertainments, which runs the tower and much of the resort, said the work would regenerate the town. "It is a building that is globally recognised," he said. "And it is like the heartbeat of Blackpool."
Hawkins believes it is possible for visitor numbers to grow to those of the 1950s and 60s.
"We need to attract families back to Blackpool. There are those who want to get rid of stag and hens completely, but there is a place for them," he added.
"There is a real genuine buzz about Blackpool that things are changing."
The visitors also seem to approve. Sue Mount from Lancaster said: "I think Blackpool had started to get run down and it is good to see all the work that is being done."
10 of the best museums in Berlin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 24, 2011
Berlin resident and travel writer Rory MacLean chooses some of the city's most impressive museums, whether you want to taste life in the former DDR or admire works by world famous artists
• As featured in our Berlin city guide
Käthe Kollwitz Museum
Of all Berlin's artists, no one captured the pain suffered in and exported from this place more than Käthe Kollwitz. The intense intimacy of her work revealed residents' hopes and horrors, as well as the unspoken pains of the poor, in images and forms which – 60 years after her death – still appear to burst from the artist's heart. This privately owned museum, just off the Ku'damm, includes hundreds of her finest drawings, etchings and sculptures. A passageway connects the museum to the neighbouring Literaturhaus, with one of the city's most civilised cafes.
• Fasanenstrasse 24, +49 30 882 5210, kaethe-kollwitz.de, adults €6, concessions €3. Open daily 11am-6pm
Neues Museum
Over the last decade the Neues Museum, a bombed-out ruin since 1945, has been repaired and rebuilt by British starchitect David Chipperfield. His recreation is a striking building which can be read like a book, telling – through its original walls, surviving textural details, all-but-lost classical frescos and soaring new spaces – the story of man's ability to create, destroy and preserve. It is the perfect museum for Berlin. The collection, which includes a Neanderthal skull, the bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti and Heinrich Schliemann's Trojan antiquities, isn't half bad either.
• Bodestrasse 1, +49 30 2664 24242, neues-museum.de, adults €10, concessions €5, under-19s free. Open Mon-Wed, Sun 10am-6pm, Thur-Sat 10am-8pm
Bauhaus Archives – Museum of Design
Berlin has long been a capital of creativity but unlike London, Paris and New York the radiance of its arts shines brightest against the darkness in its past. The city is the spiritual home of the Bauhaus, the most influential school of architecture, design and art in the 20th century. Its Archive – or Museum of Design – houses a sensational collection of sculptures, ceramics, furniture and architectural models by Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and the many others who – with the Nazis' rise to power – fled Germany and carried modernism to the New World. A free guided tour runs every Sunday at 3pm.
• Klingelhöferstrasse 14, +49 30 254 0020, bauhaus.de. Open Wed-Mon 10am-5pm (closed Tuesday), adults €7, concessions €4
Museum Berggruen
Heinz Berggruen bought his first painting in 1940 for $100 – a watercolour by Paul Klee. Half a century later, he gave to Berlin the bulk of his fabulous collection, then valued at $450m and including 165 masterpieces by Braque, Matisse, Klee and Giacometti. This intimate gallery, situated opposite the Schloss Charlottenburg, also has more than 100 works by Picasso from early student sketches to the blue and rose period through his cubist years and up to the year before his death in April 1973. Guided tours for children are offered on most Saturdays (paper and crayons provided).
• Schlossstrasse 1, +49 30 2664 24242, smb.museum, adults €6, concessions €4. Open Tue-Sun 10am-6pm
Topography of Terror
That Germany is open and dynamic today is a consequence of taking responsibility for its history. In a courageous, humane and moving manner, the country is subjecting itself to a national psychoanalysis. This Freudian idea, that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker unless it is brought to the light, can be seen in Daniel Libeskind's tortured Jewish Museum, at the Holocaust Memorial and, above all, at the Topography of Terror. Be aware that this outdoor museum, built on the site of the former headquarters of the SS and Gestapo, is not for the fainthearted.
• Niederkirchnerstrasse 8, +49 30 2545 0950, topographie.de. Open daily 10am-8pm, free
Jewish Museum
At the start of the 20th century, Berlin was the largest Jewish city in the world. One third of the 100 richest Prussians were Jews. By 1945 Hitler had destroyed Germany's rich diversity, making it both poorer and more homogeneous. Berlin's Jewish Museum – with its extension by Daniel Libeskind – explores two millennia of German Jewish history. But far from being locked in the past, the museum looks forward with child-friendly tours, weekend workshops and special shows including a histories of Jewish football and radical Jewish music in New York.
• Lindenstrasse 9-14, +49 30 2599 3300, jmberlin.de. Open Mon 10am-10pm, Tue-Sun 10am-8pm, adults €5, concessions €2.50, under-6s free
Allied Museum
At the end of the second world war, the victorious Allies divided Berlin into four sectors. Stalin's secret intention was to draw Berlin – and then the whole of Germany – into the Communist orbit. In 1948 he blockaded the city as a means of driving the Americans out of Europe, but the Allies retaliated by launching the Berlin airlift to sustain its freedom. The cold war heated up and in 1961 the Soviets built the Wall to completely encircle the western sectors. The Allied Museum tells the story of those years. Displays include the guardhouse from Checkpoint Charlie, an RAF Hastings, as well as a section of the Berlin spy tunnel, the largest ever SIS/CIA operation.
• Clayallee 135, +49 30 818 1990, alliiertenmuseum.de. Open Mon, Tue, Thur-Sun 10am–6pm, free
The Berlin Wall Memorial
Bernauer Strasse witnessed some of the most tragic scenes when the city was divided in 1961: East Berliners jumped from apartment windows, vaulted over barbed wire, tunnelled beneath the streets in an attempt to reach freedom. The Berlin Wall Memorial – which includes the city's only unadorned stretch of border fortifications and a superb museum – marks the iniquity, compliance and heroism of East and West Berliners during those tragic years. A must.
• Bernauer Strasse 111/119, +49 30 4679 866 66, berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de. Open April–October, Tue-Sun 9.30am-7pm, November-March, Tue-Sun 9.30am-6pm, free
DDR Museum
Trabants, hidden microphones, beach volleyball nudists and Spreewald pickles: Ostalgie (or nostalgia for life in former East) might worry parts of country (a recent survey found half of 16-year-olds believed East Germany was never a dictatorship), but at the DDR Museum visitors can safely experience life in under communism – at least for their 90-minute visit. Watch TV in the authentic East Berlin living room, spy on your neighbours, join the FDJ pioneers or march in the May Day parade. The museum is located on the river Spree opposite Berlin cathedral.
• Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 1, +49 30 847 123 731, ddr-museum.de. Open Mon-Fri, Sun 10am-8pm, Sat 10am-10pm, adults €6, concessions €4
Currywurst Museum
The currywurst is as much a part of Berlin as the Brandenburg Gate, with more than 70,000,000 curried sausages scoffed in the city every year. No surprise then that Berliners should celebrate their civic dish with a feel-good museum. Uncover the story of fast food through the ages, learn about the "currywurst war", lie back on the Sausage Sofa and discover why Volkswagen is one of Germany's largest sausage makers. Entrance is far from cheap but the souvenirs are among the best in Berlin (for non-vegetarians) and the complimentary "Currywurst in a Cup" has the tastiest, fruitiest sauce I've found anywhere in town.
• Schützenstrasse 70, +49 30 8871 8647, currywurstmuseum.de. Open daily 10am-10pm, adults €11, concessions €8.50, children €7, under-6s free
• Rory MacLean's book on Berlin will be published in 2012. He writes a weekly Berlin blog for the Goethe Institut
10 of the best museums in Berlin
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 24, 2011
Berlin resident and travel writer Rory MacLean chooses some of the city's most impressive museums, whether you want to taste life in the former DDR or admire works by world famous artists
• As featured in our Berlin city guide
Käthe Kollwitz Museum
Of all Berlin's artists, no one captured the pain suffered in and exported from this place more than Käthe Kollwitz. The intense intimacy of her work revealed residents' hopes and horrors, as well as the unspoken pains of the poor, in images and forms which – 60 years after her death – still appear to burst from the artist's heart. This privately owned museum, just off the Ku'damm, includes hundreds of her finest drawings, etchings and sculptures. A passageway connects the museum to the neighbouring Literaturhaus, with one of the city's most civilised cafes.
• Fasanenstrasse 24, +49 30 882 5210, kaethe-kollwitz.de, adults €6, concessions €3. Open daily 11am-6pm
Neues Museum
Over the last decade the Neues Museum, a bombed-out ruin since 1945, has been repaired and rebuilt by British starchitect David Chipperfield. His recreation is a striking building which can be read like a book, telling – through its original walls, surviving textural details, all-but-lost classical frescos and soaring new spaces – the story of man's ability to create, destroy and preserve. It is the perfect museum for Berlin. The collection, which includes a Neanderthal skull, the bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti and Heinrich Schliemann's Trojan antiquities, isn't half bad either.
• Bodestrasse 1, +49 30 2664 24242, neues-museum.de, adults €10, concessions €5, under-19s free. Open Mon-Wed, Sun 10am-6pm, Thur-Sat 10am-8pm
Bauhaus Archives – Museum of Design
Berlin has long been a capital of creativity but unlike London, Paris and New York the radiance of its arts shines brightest against the darkness in its past. The city is the spiritual home of the Bauhaus, the most influential school of architecture, design and art in the 20th century. Its Archive – or Museum of Design – houses a sensational collection of sculptures, ceramics, furniture and architectural models by Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and the many others who – with the Nazis' rise to power – fled Germany and carried modernism to the New World. A free guided tour runs every Sunday at 3pm.
• Klingelhöferstrasse 14, +49 30 254 0020, bauhaus.de. Open Wed-Mon 10am-5pm (closed Tuesday), adults €7, concessions €4
Museum Berggruen
Heinz Berggruen bought his first painting in 1940 for $100 – a watercolour by Paul Klee. Half a century later, he gave to Berlin the bulk of his fabulous collection, then valued at $450m and including 165 masterpieces by Braque, Matisse, Klee and Giacometti. This intimate gallery, situated opposite the Schloss Charlottenburg, also has more than 100 works by Picasso from early student sketches to the blue and rose period through his cubist years and up to the year before his death in April 1973. Guided tours for children are offered on most Saturdays (paper and crayons provided).
• Schlossstrasse 1, +49 30 2664 24242, smb.museum, adults €6, concessions €4. Open Tue-Sun 10am-6pm
Topography of Terror
That Germany is open and dynamic today is a consequence of taking responsibility for its history. In a courageous, humane and moving manner, the country is subjecting itself to a national psychoanalysis. This Freudian idea, that the repressed (or at least unspoken) will fester like a canker unless it is brought to the light, can be seen in Daniel Libeskind's tortured Jewish Museum, at the Holocaust Memorial and, above all, at the Topography of Terror. Be aware that this outdoor museum, built on the site of the former headquarters of the SS and Gestapo, is not for the fainthearted.
• Niederkirchnerstrasse 8, +49 30 2545 0950, topographie.de. Open daily 10am-8pm, free
Jewish Museum
At the start of the 20th century, Berlin was the largest Jewish city in the world. One third of the 100 richest Prussians were Jews. By 1945 Hitler had destroyed Germany's rich diversity, making it both poorer and more homogeneous. Berlin's Jewish Museum – with its extension by Daniel Libeskind – explores two millennia of German Jewish history. But far from being locked in the past, the museum looks forward with child-friendly tours, weekend workshops and special shows including a histories of Jewish football and radical Jewish music in New York.
• Lindenstrasse 9-14, +49 30 2599 3300, jmberlin.de. Open Mon 10am-10pm, Tue-Sun 10am-8pm, adults €5, concessions €2.50, under-6s free
Allied Museum
At the end of the second world war, the victorious Allies divided Berlin into four sectors. Stalin's secret intention was to draw Berlin – and then the whole of Germany – into the Communist orbit. In 1948 he blockaded the city as a means of driving the Americans out of Europe, but the Allies retaliated by launching the Berlin airlift to sustain its freedom. The cold war heated up and in 1961 the Soviets built the Wall to completely encircle the western sectors. The Allied Museum tells the story of those years. Displays include the guardhouse from Checkpoint Charlie, an RAF Hastings, as well as a section of the Berlin spy tunnel, the largest ever SIS/CIA operation.
• Clayallee 135, +49 30 818 1990, alliiertenmuseum.de. Open Mon, Tue, Thur-Sun 10am–6pm, free
The Berlin Wall Memorial
Bernauer Strasse witnessed some of the most tragic scenes when the city was divided in 1961: East Berliners jumped from apartment windows, vaulted over barbed wire, tunnelled beneath the streets in an attempt to reach freedom. The Berlin Wall Memorial – which includes the city's only unadorned stretch of border fortifications and a superb museum – marks the iniquity, compliance and heroism of East and West Berliners during those tragic years. A must.
• Bernauer Strasse 111/119, +49 30 4679 866 66, berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de. Open April–October, Tue-Sun 9.30am-7pm, November-March, Tue-Sun 9.30am-6pm, free
DDR Museum
Trabants, hidden microphones, beach volleyball nudists and Spreewald pickles: Ostalgie (or nostalgia for life in former East) might worry parts of country (a recent survey found half of 16-year-olds believed East Germany was never a dictatorship), but at the DDR Museum visitors can safely experience life in under communism – at least for their 90-minute visit. Watch TV in the authentic East Berlin living room, spy on your neighbours, join the FDJ pioneers or march in the May Day parade. The museum is located on the river Spree opposite Berlin cathedral.
• Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 1, +49 30 847 123 731, ddr-museum.de. Open Mon-Fri, Sun 10am-8pm, Sat 10am-10pm, adults €6, concessions €4
Currywurst Museum
The currywurst is as much a part of Berlin as the Brandenburg Gate, with more than 70,000,000 curried sausages scoffed in the city every year. No surprise then that Berliners should celebrate their civic dish with a feel-good museum. Uncover the story of fast food through the ages, learn about the "currywurst war", lie back on the Sausage Sofa and discover why Volkswagen is one of Germany's largest sausage makers. Entrance is far from cheap but the souvenirs are among the best in Berlin (for non-vegetarians) and the complimentary "Currywurst in a Cup" has the tastiest, fruitiest sauce I've found anywhere in town.
• Schützenstrasse 70, +49 30 8871 8647, currywurstmuseum.de. Open daily 10am-10pm, adults €11, concessions €8.50, children €7, under-6s free
• Rory MacLean's book on Berlin will be published in 2012. He writes a weekly Berlin blog for the Goethe Institut