Dresden & Berlin - Day 5 & 6

Huge plattenbau in Dresden.

Statue of Martin Luther in front of the Frauenkirche.

Semper's Opera.

The statue of Dionysis being pulled by four panthers. That has to be both symbolically and literally one of the better statues out there.

East German GDR (DDR) socialist art.

VW/Audi Headquarters.

Dessau & Dresden - Day 4

The Bauhaus in Dessau by Gropius.

The Masters Houses also by Gropius. This is where the teachers, such as Kandinsky and the like, lived.

This is the interior of the German equivalent of our EPA (Umweltbundesamt) also known as the Dessau Federal Environmental Agency. This may be the greenest building on the planet. It employs every green technology there is. The largest geothermal heating and cooling system in the world, solar, self venting, stack effect in the lobby, self shading, recycled materials, etc, etc. It was designed by Sauerbruch Hutton.

Here the self shading has activated.

The central corridor that all the offices look out to is filled with running water and plants. All the offices have operable windows to this space.

Typical sight on the train ride.

Semper's Opera House in Dresden.

Frauenkirche at night.

Train station in Dresden.

Readings

Hilarious Craigslist post.

Wind powered car goes faster than the wind...

The National Academy of Sciences asked a few engineers how to reduce gas consumption in cars with available technology. Basically it costs money and hybrids still aren't viable.

This is a really good article about (theoretical) congestion pricing in NYC and how it would work. A Harvard math grad put together a spreadsheet detailing the negative externalities imposed by car drivers on the city; which is exactly what congestion pricing aims to do - give incentives to people to make choices that impose less costs on others.

Berlin - Day 3

East Berlin - plattenbau.

Oscar Neimeyer apartment building - part of the redone Hansa Quater near the Tiergarten.

Alvar Aalto.

Walter Gropius.

A beer garden in the Tiergarten.

Berlin - Day 2

Great if not ominous capitals.

Marx and Engles statues that were built by the Soviets in East Berlin.

The Schinkel Museum in the Friedrichswerder Church houses Berlin's 19th century sculpture collection.

Hermes.

Karl Friedrich Schinkle. He is to German architecture what Thomas Jefferson is to American architecture.

Altes Museum by Schinkel.

Found it completely randomly for lunch (favorite beer - the hefe weiss).

The dome of the Altes Museum which is extremely similar to the Pantheon.

Neue Wache - an old guard shed turned memorial to all victims of war.

Paris - Day 6 / Berlin - Day 1

I went on a walk from my hostel to the Bastille and on the way I found this gathering of really interesting shops that all had fringe American trends or culture as their main idea. I find it humorous that Parisians both revere and revile Americans.

Chrome bags and fixie bikes.

New vintage style bikes.

This was just a cool shop. They literally had ever type of camera I knew in the window. They had a tilt-shift lens for my Mamiya, all models of Leica's, a Mamiya 7 II, and even a Hoizon; and the store was a true hole in the wall.

The Bastille.

A demonstration that turned into a protest which then turned into a conflict between the Algerians and police after I left. I went back later and all the sidewalks were wet (had to be cleaned) and police were patrolling the area heavily.

Pompidou Center - detail of how the massive trusses link to the tensions cables.

Carlo Mollino, 1950

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe/Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Designed by Peter Eisenman.

The Reichstag - it's impressively huge. Look at the scale of the people next to those columns.