There are new plans at work for Tiergarten. The last Planpflegewerk (“Management Plan”) was drafted in the ’80s, completed in 2006 with the reconstruction of all the axes into new allées. In addition to a permanent Festmeile (with or without fence), and the recent obsession to increase tourism [more]

Diplomatenpark classy villas on the south side of Tiergarten are built on a large area that was a considerable extension of Tiergarten, a wild assemblage of grasses, trees and animals. Diplomatenpark has to finance an Ausgleichsmaßnahme, which is a compensation for the disappearance of this green piece of [more]

Goldfischteich (Goldfish Pond) is ancient. First appearing in 1757 as a sunken field of stark geometric shape becoming a small water reservoir called Venussbassin. It is then enlarged and deepened by P. J. Lenné to help the flow, after he plans a network of streams through the Tiergarten. [more]

Diplomatenpark is a luxurious housing development recently completed along the Tiergartenstraße. Berlin Liegenschaftsfond sold this area with the name Diplomatenpark in the perspective of the development of a new diplomatic quarter, as it was the case here during the Third Reich. The Diplomatenpark is a series of ten [more]

Christian used to have a house on the top of a hill of a Greek village before the 2010 crisis. The house is Wittgenstein inspired, doesn’t have electricity, the toilet is a dirt field with blotches of heather, water can be found only outside, flowing from a higher [more]

It is always exhilarating when signs of appropriation, interpretation and growth keep appearing in the city and attempts of correction are given up, because more evolved aesthetics and striking beauty are at work here. Tree buds sprouting on roofs and facades, cracked roads and side walks shaped by [more]

Mores in Tiergarten are always lax and indulgent. When P. J. Lenné starts in 1830s to change things, ripping out the forest in order to get some light into it, making many clearings, opening meadows and trails, there are protests and people at first methodically destroy the work [more]

Happiness is a dark and warm piece of forest, where everybody is lingering, silent and vulnerable. On the south west side of Tiergarten, below the golden Victory Column there is a busy gay cruising area. Night and day men of every age and look are waiting here and [more]

Kanzleramt is a combination of modern and postmodern references, with gravitas, transparency and lightness playing an important symbolic role in it. One can observe the rich growth of mildew and moss crawling on the sand stone of the building, especially on its north side. For this reason the [more]

Alpine vegetation is thick, tapered to the ground, lenient. It doesn’t need much. The higher it grows the more elemental its geometry becomes. The phenomenal high desert of white and steep rocks is relentlessly colonized in fragments of green wads and furs. The commander of the British Army [more]

The best thing you could do in Tiergarten is to get lost. Four-wheel-drive Panda climbs uphill, on rocks and mud, a small chunky box, unstoppable and green. Through ferns and huge larch trees, bopping, constantly disappearing and reappearing behind mounds and bushes. It’s got attitude up to here. [more]

Early in the morning you ride your bike into the woods eventually entering a topography of glacial time: there is a slight profile to the territory, covered with moss, grasses, leading to a river. You carry a backpack with some sandwiches, apples, water. You are free to stop [more]

Tiergarten is made for everybody to sleep. When walls are more than one can stand and the world outside is unobstructed in its entirety, open and home. Now that the low forest is thin and transparent, everything is visible, also the sky. The season is back. The under-forest [more]

One of the 600 year old trees in Tiergarten. One of the 600 year old trees in Tiergarten.

With a complex plot of organic virtual reality, the film Existenz stages a world of low density and presumed post-calamity: lonely gas stations run by black marketeers in remote rural settings, individuals driving Land Rover of the series III from 1978, cute mutant animals that are bred to [more]

Devolution is a weird, idiosyncratic notion, an ambivalent byproduct of evolutionary theory. It also sounds funny. Its scientific value in biology is questioned, because it supports a biased anthropocentric notion of regress in evolution. The theory of devolution asserts that sometimes a species “de‑evolves” and therefore “degenerates” into [more]

Richard Serra sculpture, a Serra corten specific called “Berlin Junction” that was standing temporarily in 1987 in front of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, is purchased in the same year by the city of Berlin and placed in front of the main entrance of the Philharmonie, a location that pleases Serra [more]

Facing the Japanese Embassy, but standing on the all-embracing, safe side of Tiergarten, there is a new monument. Unofficial, movingly unassuming, and noticed. An insider monument composed by a very young cherry tree, few origami cranes glittering, and a small wooden shield: “Den nie gennannten Kämpfern gegen die [more]

During the 1900 craze for glorious monuments of heroic history, Tiergarten becomes the main location for an abundance of dignified and pompous works. Among them there is the 1903 monument for Richard Wagner, a sculpture by Gustav Eberlein, one of the sculptors who worked on the golden Victory [more]

Everything that happens, happens in Tiergarten. In early 1919, days after the suppression of the Spartakus insurgency, 100.000 Deutsche Mark is the unofficial reward for capturing and killing the leaders of the Spartakus group. On 15 January, at 20.30 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are arrested without a [more]

Several hawks and common buzzards live in Tiergarten. These birds of prey keep permanent nests in the middle of the city, in the forest: a fact, a paradox, unexplainable and real, contingent and advancing against the horizon of a complete humanization. Buzzards and hawks prefer to be few [more]

The second anti-aircraft gun tower is a massive concrete cube, designed by Speer and built in 1940, north of the zoo’s hippopotamus house, in Tiergarten. Square and forty meters high, it is called Zoobunker. Built to contain 15.000, when the sirens scream 30.000 people gather in front of [more]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau dies in the park of Ermenonville on 2 July 1778. His days there are otherwise perfect, where he walks around and collects plant specimens that he dries out for his book of herbs. When he dies he is placed in a tomb surrounded by poplar trees [more]

There is a hut on the Pfaueninsel that is completely covered in oak-bark. The textured surface is clearly beyond camouflage. Grotto-like and hypernatural, it hurts to look at the structure as a whole, the eye is soon permanently staring at the trippy detail of the skin. Intense. The [more]

Shortly before the end of the II World War between March and April 1945, Straße des 17. Juni with its favorable Ost-West-Achse characteristics of extreme width and length, doubles as an airplane landing and takeoff strip at the service of the Luftwaffe. The air traffic control command-post is [more]

It is 1987 and part of the 750 Years Berlin anniversary celebration is hosted on a stage design built around the golden Victory Column; a rumor goes that also a reproduction of Brandenburger Tor is part of the structure. The anniversary celebration lasts six months and has West [more]

Pariser Platz doesn’t exist before November 24, 1994. When the first MTV Europe Music Award fills the space with a white tent for 2.500 invited guests. The show is hosted by Tom Jones, Take That win best group, and Brandenburger Tor turns out well as a stage background. [more]

Alibar is a bar run by Ali. It stands in the middle of the Kulturforum and it is been invisible for eighteen years. A customized container, a dixi toilet, several bricolage storage shelves and boxes constitute Alibar, a combination of Imbiss, bar and coffee place under a thick [more]

Christoph Schaaf, the former director of Tiergarten, lives inside the forest, in a peripheral house of the small compound that includes the Berlin Parks Department. The compound is set on the side of a Baroque axis which triumphantly opens the view between Schloss Bellevue and the Tiergarten Tunnel. [more]

Rocks can evoke many different sentiments. At the Désert de Retz, deep in the forest of Marly, there is a legendary opening through a long stone wall in the woods. Through this portal the wall expands into a convoluted rock formation. Famished spruce trees, bent by numerous tempests, [more]

Built at first for the purpose of scientific research on the south west side of Tiergarten, the Berlin Zoo, transforms into a hybrid place, hosting animals but also catering to the general public’s entertainment. It becomes more and more the focus of royals, diplomats and politicians, as a [more]

At the end of the film Donnie Darko, Donnie travels through a wormhole in order to save world. The world is a personal universe of family, home, school and the dealing of adults who lost hope and innocence, corrupting the young with each decision every day. Donnie rides up [more]

Neurotically symbolic in form and choice of location, on the north side of Tiergarten along the Spree, Haus der Kulturen der Welt is an extraordinary building. Hyper-charged with the weight of semiotics, it cannot escape irony. The contribution of the United States for the International Bauausstellung of 1957, [more]

The reconstruction of several Baroque artifacts of military connotation that were omitted for ideological reasons during the replanting of Tiergarten in the ’50s and ’60s, were resumed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An example is the new layout of all the former Baroque axes as big [more]

There are two water springs running from Landwehrkanal. Bubbling, they rush in from under some thick bushes, making waves briefly. After that the water flows at reduced speed, exploiting a sweet gradient towards the river Spree. Artificial streams and ponds gather and converge the dampness of the marshy [more]

It is a praxis difficult to grasp. Adopting the eye of the alien, looking at a place, a planet, an environment as otherness, without human projection or anthropomorphist construction and prejudice. Antihumanism integrates the strangeness of the rock, insect, plant and animal, while resisting the immediate equation to [more]

David of Japan sings with luminous hair and elegant powdered face: “Boys, now the times are changing / The going could get rough / Are you contemplating moving out somewhere? / Boys, will you ever find the time? Here we are stranded / Somehow it seems the same / [more]

Sex during the 17th century belongs to the exquisite intricate geometry of the natural. There is a laxness in the codes dealing with the illicit. Directness. One lives in the embrace of the tree leaf. Rows of plants pruned into walls of verdure are there to frame dense [more]

Attiret, a French missionary priest in Beijing reports in 1743 on the large imperial Garden of the Gardens, a flamboyant aberration and delight, where several mountains are artificially constructed. Streams and canals meander in between, forming lakes that extend like a sea. The shores are full of hand-crafted [more]

They look as they’ve been flying in from far away, probably across an ocean. Stretched neck and an enormous amount of stamina. They appear in the Spring, checking the perimeter, eventually taking over. That’s the protocol. Coming out of the lake, they walk the trail in large numbers, [more]

The trees sinking in the water develop buttresses and heavy knees. The trees sinking in the water develop buttresses and heavy knees.

1) go naked, wear sandals, ride your bike, make out. the super-natu’rl luscious moss of your metabolist condo grows/unyielding. nothing can stop our voracious youth, a simple bud of your own. 2) this is a very different story from the horrifying memories/skies of hissing lava/and storms of ice [more]

Pfaueninsel is very different from Tiergarten, still both places deeply relate: in their mutual relaxed slackness, their mysterious lines of sight, juicy tender leaves and the constant crumbling of tree barks, branches and artifacts. Pfaueninsel, the “Island of Peacocks”, is the way it is out of its isolation [more]

From 1961 to 1988 there was a piece of land in Berlin without jurisdiction. A triangle of East Berlin, lying between Potsdamer Platz and Tiergarten and very close to the Berlin Wall, somehow always faced west. Plans for the large Autobahn project of the Westtangente had always included [more]

Epiphyte is a great word, also adopted by Neal Stephenson in his 1999 book Cryptonomicon as the trademark name of a corporation running a data haven for anonymous banking, electronic money and digital gold currency to fund the Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP), whose main server is [more]

Kuhle Wampe was a tent colony of workers who lived on the southern shores of the Müggelsee. It was located near a cove where the water was always cold, even in the summer, the reason for its name: Kuhle Wampe, “cool belly”. The colony began in 1913 with [more]

In 1946, when there isn’t any food available in the city, a large part of Tiergarten is divided in plots for sustenance farming. Photographs of people harvesting vegetables in front of the Reichstag or cutting hay in front of the Victoria convey a sense of closure. In 1949 [more]

The Magnetbahn was a 1.6 km magnetic levitation line built in 1984 to connect Gleisdreieck to the Kulturforum adding a futuristic quality to the composition, especially of the latter. M-Bahn was an elegant and effortless device that re-used Gleisdreieck station’s platforms and elevated tracks, after bending them a [more]

Biomass can be very beautiful. Fallen wood eaten by mushrooms, and inhabited by rare black bugs, their antennas surprisingly long; leaves rotting away on the ground, spreading the rot to other plants, wadded mats of decaying vegetation, rain pouring on it. Between water and land it is the [more]

Black is water, blue is dense vegetation, pink are paths, brown is meadow, carmine red are blooming areas. The trees were never surveyed, but their location is known to the gardeners who use this plan for their periodical maintenance chores. The lack of budget in the administration allows [more]

A wild boar stands in the middle of a perfectly round sand box. This animal is carved out of scavenged stones from the ruins of post war Berlin. It is part of the large playground near the Lutherbrücke, in the proximity of Haus der Kulturen der Welt. There [more]

Animals, plants and humans have a way with Tiergarten. Everyone can establish her own territory, around the clock. The malleable boundaries, constantly negotiated, are moving and overlapping. Animals, plants and humans have a way with Tiergarten. Everyone can establish her own territory, around the clock. The malleable boundaries, [more]

A beaver’s tail is flat and wide, flapping in the water, its hind-feet are webbed. It is a graceful swimmer. Beavers are often defamed with alleged tales of destruction, but they only cut down plants to reach the fresh foliage and build large dams if there isn’t already [more]

It’s April, two months away from the 2006 World Cup in Germany, Adidas builds a miniature copy of Berlin 1936 Olympic Stadium on the Platz der Republik. It is called World of Football. In 2005 already many locations are in discussion for this venue in the Berlin Senate. [more]

1945 Tiergarten is a battlefield. During the severe winter of 1946 the British Army gives permission to the Berliners to cut down most of the trees in Tiergarten to procure firewood. Around 200.000 trees, centuries-old, are burned. 1945 Tiergarten is a battlefield. During the severe winter of 1946 [more]

In its geological history Tiergarten is richly wet. Part of it is situated in the floodplain along the Spree, the deeply set area of Warsaw-Berlin glacial valley. It is especially evident now because of the complex network of streams running from the Landwehrkanal towards the Spree. After a [more]

The east side of Tiergarten, the one now facing the Holocaust Memorial (2005), used to lie in proximity of the Wall and was severed from the rest of the forest by the Entlastungsstraße. For fifty years this area grew wild, sandy and dry, where many dirt trails run [more]

This is the most beautiful place in the core of the city: 210 hectares of dense forest. It is traversed by wide roads, but along with its sanctified ways, there are mysterious almost invisible trails that run through dark woods. They serve a large wild population. Cunning and [more]

The Entlastungsstraße disappears in 2006 right after the World Cup. Originally it is conceived as a relief road, built during the construction of the Berlin Wall to quickly connect Schöneberg to Wedding. During the 1970s Autobahn bold euphoria the Entlastungsstraße is considered to become a permanent feature, a [more]

New Year’s Eve in Berlin, over one million humans gather in the middle of Tiergarten, on the “Festmeile” of Straße des 17. Juni. Thousands of fireworks and rockets go off for hours, have been already detonating for days. Many of the birds of the city fly higher than [more]