These will be posted in multiple parts as well, due to length.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2006

The trip actually started with an overnight train on Friday. We left Saintes at noontime, got to Paris before the evening, spent about two hours, then boarded an overnight sleeper train around 8 or 9 in the evening, bound for Berlin. Sleeping in the train was kind of tough, mostly because I wasn't used to it, and because each car room has six beds, in cramped quarters. Still, when we arrived in Berlin, we were all excited for what would prove to be a great time.

After checking into the CityStay Hostel (HIGHLY recommended if you're ever in Berlin; they have free wireless internet if you have a laptop!), we set out on our first day in the city.

Our hostel is located near a lively area called Hackescher Market, which features numerous shops, restaurants, and at night, clubs and bars. It was a nice place.

Most of our day was spent on Museum Island, home to a wonderful collection of museums (obviously). First up was passing by the Altes Museum, which defined the museum building type with its central layout of rooms from gallery to gallery. We didn't go in, but it was nice to see another building I once studied.

The Berliner Dome is the biggest Protestant church in Germany, apparently. It's extremely ornate as far as these types of churches go, but it was certainly beautiful. It was cloudy when we went in the morning, but I took a quick visit back later in the afternoon when the sun came out.

Here's another view.

You can go up to the top of the dome, where you get some great panoramic views of the city. Here's me. The TV Tower can be seen in the background.

Next was I.M. Pei's German History Museum. He actually came out of retirement to design this building after the city chose him to do the project. An iconic spiraling stair enclosed in glass marks the entrance to the building, which also connects underground to an old armory building next door that now serves as a gallery or exhibition space.

Looking up the spiraling stair.

Our final official stop was the Pergamon Museum, which features a variety of rebuilt architectural artifacts made from actual ruins transplanted from various places like Rome, Sparta, and Babylon.

The interior entrance greets visitors with the Pergamon, a large market and public plaza from the ancient days of Greece. It's pretty cool that the structures are authentic--transplanted from wherever they were plundered and moved, then rebuilt. Which means there really are parts of the museum that are thousands of years old.

Here's Sol taking a picture of me taking a picture of him while everyone sits on the steps.

We had dinner at a tapas restaurant in Hackescher Market. It was pretty nice. Here's a pic of my friends, Sarah and Danli, as well as myself.

Short report for this day... the next one is humongous.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2006

Man, what a busy and compacted day! Gorgeous weather greeted us in the morning as we started our day in Potsdamer Platz, the new city center which, less than two decades ago, was split in half by the Berlin Wall. Today, it's home to several districts full of vibrant, flashy architecture and a pretty nice social spaces. Most of the day was a walking tour with Hans, a city urban planner who could tell us a lot about the area from an architect's and urbanist's point of view.

Here's a shot of the Daimler Chrystler District, with a couple of towers jutting out toward the intersection of the main streets.

On one side, there are three Richard Rogers mixed use office/commercial buildings that front a central garden lawn.

Renzo Piano has some residential/office buildings further down the "street."

They're pretty neat, featuring a terra cotta colored facing that Piano placed on many of the buildings he designed in this complex. Comically, his good friend Rogers jokingly mimicks this architectural play in some of his buildings in the complex too. I guess that's how famous architects playfully joust in design.

And in the middle of the central green space, there are some GIANT see-saws. Our own giant of a professor, Gerald, demonstrats how to gleefully operate one.

Here's a view back at the buildings we passed.

More apartments in the area.

Venturing deeper into the neighborhood block reveals some interesting office and institutional buildings. This area is essentially one big business park. It's pretty lively on weekdays, but much more dead on weekends when the people who work here aren't here to use it.

Across the street is the famous Sony Center, a "CityWalk" sort of complex with a centralized plan and a huge glass roof that reminds me of Space Mountain.

It is supported entirely by tension. To build it, workers first erected a huge column (no dirty jokes, please) in the center to support the span. Next came the structure on top, where the glass was laid, and then the tension cables below it, hooking into part of the column. When the cables were stressed to pull the forces outward, most of the column was sawn off, leaving an open central space. It's a pretty amazing construction from a structural point of view.

Some restaurants and shops inside the complex. A second level leads to more shops, cafes, and clubs, and the rest is actual residential, which makes this one interesting mixed use project.

Afterwards, our walking tour with Hans took us to Peter Eisenmann's Memorial for the Murdered Jews, which opened last year. It is a very simple but powerful series of monolithic black blocks protruding to various heights out of an undulating ground plane. As such, in some places, you can sit on the blocks, where in other places, they rise up well over your head.

I didn't think too much of it when I first saw it in Architectural Record, but I must say that going through it was pretty cool, and my opinion is a lot higher now than before. It promotes contemplation and exploration, mingling a physical and mental exercise into one.

Cool artistic shot of the sky from within the memorial.

Next was the government district. Here's the Reichstag, complete with Norman Foster's famous dome.

This area has a lot of new monumental architecture. The architect of this building (whose name escapes me at the moment) was heavily influenced by Louis Kahn, hence the geometric blocks and shapes that dominate the building.

Here's another view. It's a nice building.

Calatrava built a pedestrian bridge here. It was the first thing built on this redeveloped government zone, an honor given to him after he lost out on the Reichstag dome competition even though he was the one who came up with the glass dome idea in the first place. The bridge is nothing special compared with Calatrava's other works, but it's nice.

Here's the new Berlin Central train station, which opened only a few months ago. It's new, glass, and steel.

Modern and high tech interior space. Oooooooooh...

We went back to the hostel in the afternoon for a break before coming back out late afternoon to visit the Reichstag.

On our way there, we past by Brandenberg Gate, one of Berlin's central icons. It's sort of like the Arc de Triumph of this city in the way it serves as a landmark and gathering space.

We got to the Reichstag in time for magic hour, which yielded this very vivid but interesting photo of the building under the soft light. It looks extremely odd on stone in my opinion, but was still strikingly beautiful.

Speaking of strikingly beautiful, magic hour produced this amazing swath of light over the lawn across from the Reichstag.

After an hour in line, we finally entered the building and went up to the roof. Here's me.

It's very nice and sleek inside. Two curving ramps spiral up to the top viewing deck (one goes up, the other goes down). A viewing window allows people to look down into Parliament itself, expressing the openness of Germany's democracy.

Kinda reminds me of Star Wars and the Old Republic... yeah, I'm a nerd...

Had to include this really neat picture of light as it shines through a rotating sunshade device that prevents direct light from entering the Parliament chambers. It creates an incredible effect on the ramp above.

Me and KT (okay, fine, KT and I) on the ramp.

The dome at night.

After dinner, we went to some architect's bar and studio place. Basically, these guys are artists, and they tag the building and decorate it and do a whole bunch of weird things artistically. It's actually pretty cool, to be frank. Just thought I'd include that to close the evening off.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2006

After a very compacted day of seeing a lot of things in little time yesterday, today was much more relaxed. Class got out at... 12:30. Wow, that was a surprise.

Our first stop was the Berlin Philharmonic building, by Hans Scharoun. This Expressionist building could pass for a primitive version of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which makes sense, since Gehry is essentially an Expressionist. Scharoun, however, outdates him by nearly half a century, and this building features some wonderful moments of light, section, detail, and sound.

The interior is pretty convoluted but very cool. I was actually surprised by how "small" it is. I'd somewhat studied this building before and had thought it to be larger in scale, but it's actually rather intimate. And the acoustics are superb as well.

Balconies spill over each other, clouds hang everywhere, and the ceiling undulates with a dynamic energy that makes this a wonderful space.

Next was the New National Gallery, by Mies Van Der Rohe, master of the minimalist style. And minimalist this is! Basically, it's a huge metal waffle slab supported on 8 columns along the perimeter of the building, with glass enclosing the space. That's it.

Scharoun also designed a library across the street that resembled his philharmonic hall from the exterior. Inside, there's a similar sense of dynamic space, with textured beams and columns, bridges, stairs breaking through, and the structure being clearly expressed.

In the afternoon, I returned to the government district for some more photographs, this time with the sun out!

Same thing.

The Reichstag was gorgeous in the afternoon sun.

And here's Berlin Central Station again. I forgot to mention, last time, that it is the new central hub of every train system, with connections to the Berlin metro system, inter-city trains, regional trains, and international trains to other countries. Definitely a great hub.

And here's a shot inside the top level of the station, showing off that sexy tension-arch structure.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2006

Our final class day in Berlin began with us getting lost in West Berlin for about five minutes. Once that was done, we made our way to the Jewish History Museum, by Daniel Liebeskin.

This buliding is perhaps most famous for its exterior building skin, which features metal panels being cut by small, slitted windows. Cut is the appropriate word here, since the building as a whole represents the torn history of the Jewish people.

It's kind of a hit or miss building in my opinion, but must people seem to love it.

You can see the Garden of Exile to the right. This area is interestingly similar to Eisenmann's Holocaust memorial, except it has willow trees literally buried in the huge concrete planters. It would be interesting to see if Eisenmann was thinking of Liebeskin's garden when he was designing his own project.

The interior twists and winds its way around, offering several paths through its exhibits. The result is a very penetrated space that's also convoluted. Without navigational arrows on the ground, it might actually be pretty easy to get lost. I would normally find this annoying, but I think it's appropriate in this museum, which focuses on the tension of the Jewish history.

Later, we walked the streets of Berlin, where old mixes with new and a major building boom has been ongoing for a good decade or more now.

In fact, the amount of new construction here is unparalleled anywhere else in the world--except in China.

We passed by the GSW Headquarters building by Sauerbruch Hutton. Another building I studied (two semesters ago, in fact) in studio.

We ended the official day at Checkpoint Charlie, famous site of many flights from East Berlin to West Berlin. The Wall has long since been torn down, but there's a museum nearby that we were forced to visit. Its convoluted layout made me quite frustrated. Plus it was extremely stuffy in there.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2006

Free day! With no field studies or official tour to take in, we were free to do whatever we wanted... until 8 in the evening, when we would be leaving on an overnight train to Paris. So what did we do?

Sleep in of course. C'mon. We're college students. Work hard. Play hard. Party hard. Sleep.... when we can.

So after a surprisingly fantastic lunch of Vietnamese food (HOORAY VIETNAMESE FOOD!!!) at a restaurant called Monsieur Vuong's, where we had some great spring rolls among other things (see first picture), we went to Berlin's Olympic Stadium for the afternoon.

This thing's old. It was built for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. You know, the one where Jessie Owens stunned Hitler by outrunning all of his "superior" German athletes? Yeah. A big F-U to the Nazis there. Anyway, while the Nazis were eventually demolished, this stadium wasn't. Mostly because it was and is a pretty nice stadium, reminiscent to me of the Coliseum in LA. The outside is a very monumental but simple stone and concrete facade that also supports the arena.

Here's me.

Inside, there's a track and a soccer field. The same one they played the World Cup finals on this past summer. They've also got a new roofing system that provides shade to pretty much every seat and is somehow held up by twenty very thin columns that ring the middle of the upper deck. Very cool.

We decided to sit down and watch an invisible game.

And once sunset came around, the soft light gave the stadium a beautiful glow.

By the evening, it was time to leave Berlin and head to Paris for a second trip.

Overall, Berlin was a pretty fun place and a fantasic city. It moved in front of Amsterdam as my second favorite city in Europe, but couldn't quite nip out Paris (which holds a special place in my heart... um... just because). However, shopping is fantastic in Berlin, and I highly recommend it. You can get some good stuff for pretty cheap prices!