CONSIDERED BY SOME to be the world’s first industrial designer, Peter Behrens (1868-1940) is also one of the giants of modern German architecture. His legacy looms especially large in Berlin, where two massive building complexes—the Turbinenfabrik in Moabit and the AEG Humboldthain campus in Wedding—tower monumentally over their respective neighborhoods.
THAT SPECIAL TIME of year… when the pastels of the DDR Plattenbauten match the budding flowers.
The Interbau (International Building Exhibition) of 1957 was a bold attempt to not only rebuild but also re-modernize Hansaviertel, the bulb-shaped section of Berlin-Tiergarten that had been devastated by Allied bombs during the war. Designed by a team of modernist architects including Le Corbusier, Oskar Niemeyer, and Walter Gropius, the project presented its angular, geometric, and frequently colorful designs as a Western counterpoint to the grandiose neoclassical rebuild of Karl-Marx-Allee in the Soviet Quarter.
Now I know why they call Main Street a drag
– Jeremy Gluck, Sorrow Drive
CIVILISATIONS ARE JUDGED by what they leave behind. Sometime around the beginning of the automobile age – that period in the post-war years when car ownership became not merely affordable but essential – it was determined that there existed a proportional relationship between the speed of travel and the size a sign needed to be in order to convey its information to the traveller. Simply put, as roads grew wider and faster, the signs grew larger.
THIS YEAR’S BERLINALE Festival—the 67th—featured a wide-ranging selection of curiosities from decades past, from thwarted epics to camp relics to vast, inscrutable psychedelia.
GROWING UP, I had a closer-than-usual relationship with Atari’s games: with a close family member who worked at the then-young Silicon Valley company, I had access to dozens of games, sometimes even in pre-release builds. With most of the games I played existing only on floppy disks, this mind-bending cover art (not to mention any sort of packaging, background info, or instruction manual) was totally absent from the experience. This meant contending not only with the games’ built-in learning curves, but also figuring out the frequently bizarre lore and background stories of the games only through their totemic, rudimentary pixel art.
