Berlin in Seven Parts (Day 3)

Day 3: Potsdamer Platz, Neue Nationalgalerie, Tiergarten

On yet another beautiful spring day, we hopped our ever-stalwart U-Bahn over to the Potsdamer Platz, which we had zoomed by the other day on the tour. Here's a shot of the iconic train station framework and a few of the newer buildings.

Directly to the south was this interesting bank of buildings. I'm not sure what they all were. Perhaps in mixed-use communities of the future, that will be life as usual.

As I've mentioned before, Potsdamer Platz has a storied history. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was the busiest traffic intersection in all of Europe, hub of Berlin's glitzy nightlife, and on par with Picadilly Circus and Times Square in terms of legendary cosmopolitan glamor. Berlin's five busiest streets converged on it, and it had Europe's first automatic traffic signals, a huge first-class department store (Wertheim's), fancy hotels, and a station for several railway lines that made it the transit hub of Europe.

Then, it was completely laid to waste in WWII, along with most of Berlin. Then, it was cut in half by the Berlin Wall beginning in the 1960s, and became essentially a desolate field. Only recently, after Germany's reunification, have redevelopment projects begun to restore it.

One of the art installations on the platz is a series of oval mirrors, suspended high in the air. If you look closely, you can see us in this one.

After about a half-mile's walk, we came upon the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall. It's supposed to resemble a ship, and while it's a weird structure, it has an amazing auditorium as we shall see later.

I couldn't believe my eyes. Next slide.

The goal of today's trip was the Neue Nationalgalerie -- a famous building with an even more famous art collection. It's this flat iron-and-glass thing across the street, and it was designed by the famous Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, who was known for his minimalist re-imagining of buildings such as the Seagram building in New York City. The effect of this building is in its enormous windows that seem to hover like sheets of falling water around the massive iron roof, and temporary galleries can be placed on the ground floor while the majority of the art collection is underground.

The interior of the ground floor. There was only one artwork on display -- this enormous two-sided ring mural. It was a great use of the space, and there was more painting on the work's inner surface, which is what the people who are looking up are seeing. The magic of the building; its vastness and transparency, was really evident from being inside.

The actual permanent collection on display downstairs was jaw-dropping, and contains "new" works from the early part of the 20th century, as well as more recent art. There were pieces by Kirchner, Miro, Kandinsky, and Picasso, among others. It was a fascinating museum, and I spent a lot of time looking at its many exhibitions of painters I hadn't heard of before.

Back at Potsdamer Platz, a cool reflection of one building in another.

Also, a few extant sections of Berlin Wall, to show where it once stood.

After museums, it's always time for lunch. This was another strange self-service restaurant near the platz called Vapiano. In this scheme, you get in a line, and when it's time to order, you see the chef make your dish (as if at Subway, except it's pasta.) There were basil plants on every table for garnishing, and it was a delicious meal.

This is the building we looked at while eating. I wish I knew what it was.

After lunch, there's always room for a little nap. Luckily, Potsdamer Platz is just to the south of the Tiergarten, or the "Central Park" of Berlin. Split by the Strasse des 17. Juni thoroughfare, the Tiergarten's two mirror halves are referred to as the "green lungs" of the city. It's massive, and peaceful, and about as central as a park can be in a huge city.

Here is one of the many wide, meandering paths through the Tiergarten. Beautiful.

Finally, we visited the Jewish Museum back in Kreutzberg for out last stop of the day. It was an interesting collection of cultural items and stories, and the architecture was stunning, but it had a little too much Holocaust coverage. One of the prerequisites of the Berlin trip was to keep out of WWII as much as possible, though I guess you can only stray so far from it in a German museum dedicated to Judaism. I didn't get many pictures of the exhibits, but one of was an amazing 3-D interactive touch-map of various allied and axis countries during the war; touch the map, which was projected on a vast table, and a digital projector would open up information on the map's surface as if by magic.

However, these photos are of the cherry orchard in the central yard of the museum, with the blossoms just starting to pop.

Ahhhhh. End Day 3.