As some of you may know, I did a semester of university in Germany in 2007, and this was the first time back to Berlin since then.. At that time I was going there, with my good friend Alyssa, as a weekend break from our studies at the Koln International School of Design. We both were accepted for a semester abroad there from U of A and we graduated together. The last time I saw Alyssa was in Vancouver in 2023, she was quite an accomplished designer who had travelled and worked around the world at that point, and unfortunately she was sick with breast cancer. Sadly she passed away recently, at the age of 38, so when I stepped on the streets of Berlin I was haunted a bit by memories of her laughter as we boarded tandem bikes in old Soviet style hats and squealed across the city. Bringing your own haunts into a city so full of recent memories is a sobering experience; memorial sites dot the city from victims of the holocaust to victims of attempted wall escapees demarcated as a visible scar that runs through this city.
This city will always have a special place in my heart, as this was the city where I chose to become an architect. I fell in love with a building, something that had never happened before, and it was the Jewish museum by Daniel Libeskind that made me want to create form that would evoke emotion in others. This is some of the interiors that impacted me almost 20 years ago to follow the path that I am on now, I am so grateful to have the opportunity to see them again. The use of scale, section, light, and shadow is a powerful experience, especially given the context of the museum, made me realize that space can evoke emotion, reflection, sadness, joy, and form experiences. That the spaces we build as architects can have the power to influence.
We ended our tour of Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie and touring the Wall Museum learning about all the extraordinary feats people used to escape from the Soviet run Eastern Berlin into the Western world. So much ingenuity from hot air balloons, developing motorized underwater apparatuses, even one guy cultivating a relationship with a woman that looked like his wife who was stuck over in Eastern Germany. Then one day they both visit on a holiday and we does a switcheroo and leaves the poor girl over there and sneaks his wife back with her stolen papers..wow that is mean. I want to close this entry with an old photo of Alyssa and me hanging out at Check Point Charlie, it was a beautiful day then as it was this time around. Goodbye old friend.
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