THE U7 IN its current form was largely a product of Cold War-era West Berlin, and is arguably the most “West Berlin” of all U-Bahn lines. Despite being Berlin’s longest U-Bahn line (as well as one of the longest underground urban rail lines in all of Europe at 31.8 kilometers), every single one of its stations, from Rudow in the southeast to Rathaus Spandau in the northwest, falls within the borders of the former West Berlin.
THE SIEMENSBAHN WAS a short, “spur”-style urban railroad that served Berlin’s northwestern district of Siemsstadt from 1929 until 1980. Consisting of only three stations, it originated at Jungfernheide (a still-active station on the present-day Ringbahn), crossing the Spree and passing through the Wernerwerk and Siemensstadt stations before ending at Gartenfeld.
BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE IS experiencing something of a renaissance – or at the very least, a zombified second coming. With the opening of formerly sequestered countries in the Eastern Bloc and the ease of taking and sharing digital photos, hulking tower flats and concrete curiosities have emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. In the words of the authors, “The Iron Curtain was understood in the West as The Concrete Curtain. Everything behind it was perceived as mass produced and grey.”
Shots of the ring road around Kawaguchiko (Lake Kawaguchi, Fuji Five Lakes Area) in springtime. The lake and surrounding areas are a wildly varied mix of posh resorts, working-class restaurants, dilapidated former-glory hotels, modernist developments, and empty lakeside parks, reminiscent of South Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border and countless other mountain resort towns.
SIEMENS, MUCH LIKE AEG and Daimler, is a present-day German company with roots stretching back to the 19th century. Founded in an office on Kreuzberg’s Schöneberger Straße in 1847, by the time of founder Werner von Siemens’ death in 1892 the company had offices in 13 countries.
WHILE THE PRIMARY campus of Berlin’s Freie Universität is in Dahlem, just west of the Botanischer Garten and just south of the US embassy’s imposing Dahlem location, the university also includes other satellite campuses in the former West Berlin. One of these is the Benjamin Franklin campus, located several kilometers southeast of Dahlem on the Spree.
THE VILLAGE OF Rummu, in northern Estonia, is home to a geographical oddity: a lake with several offshore buildings that are partially or completely submerged, skirted by pale white hills that taper down to a gentle, beach-like incline. The lake is in fact a former limestone and marble quarry, now shut down and flooded. The site teems with plant and animal life, particularly in the summer, making it a striking blend of the idyllic and creepy – particularly given that one of the sunken buildings is a former prison that once housed the quarry’s involuntary labor source.
SPOMENIK MONUMENT DATABASE, out this week from FUEL Publishing, chronicles the massive, brutalist war memorials spread across the former Yugoslavia. While “spomenik” simply means “memorial” in Serbo-Croatian, the word has come to be associated with the particular form these monuments took from the 1960s to the 1980s: wildly asymmetrical abstract constructions of concrete, stone and metal, often placed incongruously in remote, pastoral settings.
