Archinect - News

A new map offers a unique historical exploration of Berlin's eclectic subway architecture

2021-10-05T14:47:00-04:00

Blue Crow Media’s latest update to a series of influential design maps uses 50 select sites along the U-Bahn, Berlin’s invisible lifeline, as a means of looking into the social and economic impacts of architecture in 20th-century Berlin.

Courtesy Blue Crow Media

Featuring photography from Nigel Green, architectural historian Verena Pfeiffer-Kloss’s two-sided, bilingual guide offers a lurid investigation into significant design elements of the network using examples from 1902 to 2009.

Courtesy Blue Crow Media

More than half of the current system was designed by Swedish architect Alfred Grenander before his death in 1931. His Art Noveau inspiration gave way to modernism in the years that followed.

Stations by Rainer Gerhard Rümmler served as an integral part of post-war Berlin’s unique and often eclectic mix of architecture.

The map celebrates their and other contributions while encouraging readers to observe the deta...

'Starry-eyed' Berlin's new Museum Island U-Bahn station is turning heads

2021-07-13T13:58:00-04:00

A theatrical new subway station is gracing the Berlin stage after a dramatic opening Friday.

The new Museumsinsel U-Bahn station is part of an expansion of the U5 that will connect the line into an area of the city called Museum Island.

Swiss architect Max Dudler is behind the transformation, which was inspired by theater sets built by the great 19th-century German designer Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

The final stage of the €500 million ($590 million) project was unveiled last week following lengthy delays that have set back Dudler since winning the competition for its design in 1998.

Photo: André Carré, via @BVG_Kampagne/Twitter

Starry-eyed Berliners can now embark on their journeys underneath a deep blue ceiling vault dotted with over 6,000 points of light that runs almost the entire length of the 180-meter station. A dark-grey main concourse takes riders through a colonnaded hall composed of granite from the Fichtel Mountains to evoke a classical feel. The new station, along with ...

The guerrilla designers fixing an iconic, but hideous, symbol of Berlin

2016-08-09T13:55:00-04:00

The Brandenburg Gate is Berlin’s most famous monument. In 1788, King Frederick William II of Prussia commissioned the Gate, which was designed by architect Carl Gotthard Langhans, to represent peace following the Thirty Years’ War.

The Nazis used the Brandeburg Gate as a party symbol and it was heavily damaged during the War. It backgrounded Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech when he famously challenged the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” After the fall of the Berlin wall, the gate became a symbol of reunification. Today, it adorns mugs, t-shirts, keychains. It’s also the logo of the of the BVG, Berlin’s public transport company, which runs the U-Bahn.

But, as 1843 Magazine notes, the logo is hideous. The perspective is inaccurate and the lines are heavy and awkward. So a couple of Brazilian-Berliners took it upon themselves to clean up the logo. They’ve printed the revamped illustration on clear stickers and passed them out to the public.

Now the BVG has promised a...