Berliner Esplanade

This is one thing which really caught my eyes on my trip to Berlin - the former Grand Hotel Esplanade ('A Historical Landmark for the Future'). Once a central meeting point for the Berlin society, before 90% of it was destroyed in the Second World War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the remains of the Esplanade became protected under the German Landmark Preservation Laws.

I find it a very poetic idea to encase the Esplanade façade in a glass box. The steel railings and reflections of futuristic concrete buildings form a dramatic contrast but also add a certain sadness to it. The delicate, faded grandeur of this site is right at the entrance to the Sony Centre. How ironic and inharmonious. And yet how strangely wonderful.

An old photograph of the former Grand Hotel Esplanade

A photograph showing Willi Wendt's inner courtyard garden

Another example of Berlin's signature quirkiness (above & below): Kaisersaal Cafe's interior/exterior designs as well as its location in the high-tech Sony Centre. I love how they blend the delicate and the minute (tiny roses, baby orchids, old-school vintage cafe tables etc.) with the exposed harsh metals and futuristic, greenhouse-like glass.

Berlin grows on me. It is a moving, changing, organic city with a serious edge that slowly draws you in. It does not dazzle at first glance but its bizarre intrigue lies in the explosive and discordant combination of old and new, like an incongruous melting-pot of the classical and the underground, a cacophonous symphony of Stravinsky. The beauty of it is that its strangeness never ceases to fascinate and captivate.

(Photographs taken during my previous visit to Berlin in July, 2008.)