NowBerlin

Architecture

Architecture in Berlin

Berlin's twentieth century is legible as architecture because so much of it was destroyed, divided and then rebuilt with the decisions left visible. The buildings that matter here are mostly about absence.

• Neues Museum

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  Completed 2009

  David Chipperfield

  The rebuilding of a museum on Museum Island that had stood as a ruin since 1945. David Chipperfield repaired what survived and filled the gaps in plain brick and concrete without imitating the lost detail, so every replacement is visible as one. Scorched columns and damaged frescoes were left as they were found. It set the terms for how the country rebuilds a ruin, which is by never concealing the join.

• Holocaust Memorial

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  Completed 2005

  Peter Eisenman

  A field of concrete stelae covering a block south of the Brandenburg Gate. Peter Eisenman set the slabs on a strict grid at uniform spacing but varied their heights and tilted the ground beneath, so the surface reads as flat from outside and closes over anyone inside it. There are no names, no inscriptions and no single entrance. Withholding information is the argument the design makes.

• Jewish Museum

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  Completed 1999

  Daniel Libeskind

  An extension to the city museum, built as a zinc-clad zigzag with no entrance of its own. Daniel Libeskind cut voids straight through the plan from roof to foundation, so the route repeatedly meets an empty concrete shaft that cannot be entered. Windows are slashes set on lines drawn between the addresses of Berlin Jews. The building stood finished and empty for two years before the exhibition arrived, and it worked in that state.

• Reichstag dome

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  Completed 1999

  Norman Foster

  The rebuilding of the parliament, with a glass dome placed over the chamber. Norman Foster ran a public ramp up the inside of the dome so visitors stand above the debating floor rather than beside it. A mirrored cone at the centre drops daylight into the chamber and draws used air out. The rebuilt walls keep the Soviet soldiers' graffiti from 1945 where it was found.

• Berliner Philharmonie

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  Completed 1963

  Hans Scharoun

  A concert hall built at the edge of the divided city, on ground with no centre to face. Hans Scharoun put the orchestra in the middle and terraced the audience around it in irregular blocks, which no concert hall had done. The exterior takes its shape from that interior instead of presenting a facade. Every vineyard-plan hall built since descends from this room.