Holiday in Berlin

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 943, 9 April 1930, Page 6

Holiday in Berlin

BRITISH ARCHITECTS’ TOUR Impressions from Germany

IMPRESSIONS, some favourable, others, to say tlie least of them, unusual, were brought hack to England when a party of British architects returned from a tour of German towns. All members were particularly taken hv the sound sense of the town-planning in Berlin.

“Arrived in Berlin in time for dinner and to see a little of ttte city before dark,” wrote Professor C. H. Reilly to the “Manchester Guardian,’’ regarding a tour of German towns by a party of English architects. “Walked from the station down the Friedrichstrasse —a sort of Market

Street with all that thoroughfare’s specialities and activities carried on with German thoroughness —;to the Unter den Linden. Confess to a little disappointment in the latter. Not as fine as the Champs Elysees. Street too narrow and the lindens too old. Still a strong, straight backbone to the eity, and opening magnificently into the square at the Brandenburg Gate, with its two fine Greek porticoes, through which you approach the forest. Such it really is, though called the Tiergarten.

“There is no doubt the Prussians have a sense of town-planning, if not of all the subtleties of architecture. Great roads pierce this forest in every direction. Nevertheless took a taxi —one never knows; it might be a Hyde Park. Crossed miles of it and then, after a tall plaster district like Bayswater, came to what is called the West End. If one looked up above the shops it did not seem very different from the rest of Berlin, which one must admit at once is mainly of Victorian complacency and solidity. One of the English architects called It mainly Manchester, but that was unfair to both sides. Nowhere has it a continuous air of smartness.

“Shops here and there are wonderful. They and the new restaurants and roof gardens, night and day, but particularly at night, represent the new post-war architecture, built mostly, they tell me, with American money. This architecture is ruthless in the plain bigness of its elements. A shop built In it disconnects itself from its neighbours above it and on either side by great slabs of what appears to be marble or bright sheet metal in the daytime and by broad continuous bands of electric light at night. PRODIGAL WITH LIGHTS

“Indeed, the night architecture, built' up of light, is the exciting new thing. A cinema, for instance, will have two great columns of light on either side of the proscenium, where we might have two ordinary solid columns, and the rest of the interior drawn in bands of light. Electricity must be half the price it is with us. They told me it was less than gas, and that although Berlin has no more water-power than we have. Imagine, then, the gaiety of the streets when all the theatres, restaurants, and shops are outlined and built up in light, not with the flickering, winking signs we have, but with broad, continuous beams. Many new metals add to these effects. Doors, windows. and whole interiors occasionally are coated with chromium silver plate or a bright golden bronze alloy, which we rarely see at home. One store had a lofty circular staircase with pale blue walls, white marble steps, and silver balustrade in long spiral lines. Inside the circular well of the stair was a complete glass and silver enclosure up which shot a glass and silver lift, as to heaven! I have never seen anything of the kind so gay and attractive. No wonder this enterprising shop had other attractions, too. It was an outfitter’s. and gave any decent-looking man between 10 o’clock and 4 a free massage, having a fine set of rooms for the purpose. While you were being massaged your clothes were pressed and ironed and soft drinks offered you, all as gift—to be talked about afterward. That is the paint. “Another great store, this time in a poorer quarter, has two sets of moving stairways from the underground railway below it to the roof garden above the twelfth floor, where one saw thousands having their meals. Indeed, the use of flat roofs for dancing and eating, in a climate not so unlike ours, is something we could well copy, including the sliding glass roofs and sides to he drawn to when a storm comes up. But everywhere throughout Berlin you can dance and eat out of doors. Even one of the two State opera houses has a great and very beautiful enclosed garden for the purpose, built last year. TRUE SUN BATHING

“It is all part of the desire to live in the open, which reaches its climax in the half-dozen sun-bathing clubs on the lakes round the town, where you drive up in your car, leave your clothes in it, and spend the day, week-end. or whatever period it may be, clotheless. Whole families do it. The only intruder resented and ruthlessly set upon is he or she who keeps on, or tries to, one modest (or, as they should say. immodest) garment. Those of our party who spent a day at one of these clubs, being elected members at the door rather like what used to Uappen at our own lesser night clubs, having returned full of the healthy happiness of it. and say that after the first five minutes all self-consciousness disappears,

oven at meal times in the restaurant. The only time you feel depressed and awkward is when you get back into your everyday clothes (I noticed all who went had very good figures). “If the outskirts of Berlin are full

of new life there is something sad about the heart of it. Those smooth, empty seas of glossy asphalt where the Unter den Linden gives up its lime trees and the palaces of the Kaiser and Crown Prince stand among the wealth of public buildings, unequalled at any rate in scale and massiveness, are now bereft of the uniformed figures which once . gave them the necessary colour. One still admires the town-planning' which placed next to the palaces of princes the palaces of learning and gave to each such noble open spaces, but one cannot withhold almost a feeling of sorrow for the colossal but rather ridiculous equestrian statues of emperors stranded now as in a desert. Of the buildings, one might easily mistake the Cathedral for the Reichstag, and vice versa, so overloaded and characterless are both except for their absurd pomposity. No wonder the post-war architecture of Berlin is a revolt.”