Random impressions from a recent visit to Berlin. The city never ceases to impress, in one way or another. Since leaving Berlin, I´ve lived in Chicago and presently live in Vienna. Both cities have very pretty general aesthetics and architectural highlights, Berlin on the other hand has a hard time pleasing the visitors eye. But dig deeper and the reward will arise. 

To the left the very core of the City of Berlin, the Nikolai Quarter. Almost completely razed during the war, the old building is one of the less than handful that survived the bombardments. All other buildings in the picture were erected between the 60s and 80s.

The astronaut in Kreuzberg. The empty spaces around this building don´t only account for war damages, but also for crazy plans of the 60s and 70s to raze the complete quarter around Oranienstrasse in order to pave a multilane highway through the area. Luckily squatters occupied many empty buildings in the process, thus preventing further mismanagement by city officials. Nowadays it´s generally acknowledged that leftist squatters saved a lot of old building infrastructure from complete destruction.

Around the same time city officials were responsible for other 'architectural crimes' in working class neighborhoods. Low cost contemporary inner city projects were predestined to become social hot spot areas. Public housing in Neukölln (in this particular case not a hot spot).

Mercedes Benz O 319, a very cool mini-bus from a time when some vehicles had a soul.

Seen in Treptow.

An elegant staircase in Berlins Central District, Nikolai church towers in background.

Weissensee was a preferred residential area in former East Berlin and is still

popular today. The picture shows the local public school.

The entrance to a low emission and sustainable office building, that is part of a larger ensemble containing old parts of the former Central Gas Warehouse in Friedrichshain.

Bridge with a message in the central district.

What a view! A combined heat and power station behind an apartment block. The temporary car park belongs to a close-by hospital complex in Buch, a district with rural character on the northern edge of Berlin.

A typical entrance to a communal working-class quarter of last centurys 20s. Neukölln.

Socialist and Nazi architecture had some similarities at times. The Dynamo Sports Hall in Hohenschönhausen was inaugurated in 1958 and is part of the vast sports and Olympic training complex of former East-Berlin. Due to the citys 30 year division, Berlins infrastructure often has two of everything, so why not two Olympic training grounds.

Another combined heat and power station, this one state of the art in the central district.