The History Of Trees

Rising through the foliage in Berlin’s Tiergarten is a mysterious townhouse complex completed in 1992 by the eco-architecture pioneer Frei Otto. Rediscovered by the city’s creative class, it’s now a model for living more freely in an everurbanising world.

-  Megan O’Grady

A Decade Ago, when I lived in Berlin, I would often detour from my daily run through Tiergarten, the city’s appealingly untended park, to visit certain buildings I felt drawn to for reasons I couldn’t name. These were largely (though not exclusively) midcentury dwellings — some neglected, others wildly overgrown — on or in the park that seemed to reify my sense of the city’s layered strangeness, of its mystery and opportunity for discovery. Even more than other European cities, Berlin is marked by the remains of all kinds of ideologies past, from the TV Tower in the vast main square, Alexanderplatz, a retro-future icon erected in the late 1960s by the East German government in a now poignant display of might, to the buildings the Nazis left behind. (Hitler never did fully realise his vision of a rebuilt Berlin as the capital of “Germania,” but the kind of neo-Classical bombast he had in mind is evident in the Olympic Stadium, which he commissioned shortly after he took power in 1933 and was completed in time for the 1936 Summer Games, and the limestone Tempelhof Airport terminal, which was constructed between 1936 and 1941 and, following the war, became a site of the airlift that sustained the city with food and supplies when Stalin blocked access to West Berlin.) All architecture conveys a set of narratives, histories and values for how best to live, and today’s Berlin, a jumble of tragedy and utopian ambitions past — and, these days, encroaching foreign investment — can feel like an especially dark choose-your-own adventure story.