Sometimes, while traveling or at home, you just fall in love with a building. It might be majestic like Notre Dame, massive like the Jeronimos Monastery, soaring like the Empire State Building, beautifully-detailed like the Chrysler Building…or it might just have an odd charm of its own that is endearing for reasons that aren’t easy to explain. All that’s by way of introducing one of my favorites, the charming brick fantasy of Berlin’s City Hall, the Rotes Rathaus (literally Red City Hall).
As historic buildings go, it’s not that old. It was built in the 1860s on the site of five previous city halls, with the goal of consolidating the seat of the growing capital of an increasingly powerful nation. It’s hard to define it’s style; some have claimed north Italian High Renaissance as the model, others have found resemblances to Gothic cathedrals. Either way, it’s one of a kind.
Sadly, I had only a brief chance to meet it, and none to go inside, but I’ll be back next year to give it a proper visit. In the meantime, I’ve had to make do with my few pictures, and some from others to give you a sense of its charm.
It’s quite central to Berlin; in fact, the district it’s in is called Mitte (Middle). Nearby is the Museum Island with important museums and the site of the former city palace of the Prussian kings and emperors. And directly next door is the iconic structure of East Berlin’s Cold War years: the Fernsehturm (TV tower) from which this picture was taken. Notice the design that leaves every room with a window; the lightwells were even more important when it was built, before electric light.
Parts of the building were damaged during wartime bombing, but it was intact enough to serve as headquarters for the civil governments of the four Allied sectors of the city until 1949; after that, only the East Berlin government occupied it until 1990. The damage was repaired between 1951 and 1956; another renovation was done after re-unification, and a project ongoing now is adding solar panels to the roof.
The most obvious feature, aside from the stolid red bricks where so many other 19th century monuments would have used marble or other stone, is the slim, tall tower. Even the mating of the tower and the block has its own ornamentation, a curl of brick suggesting the top of a battlement.
But some of my favorite details are the small friezes on lower balconies, and especially the formidable but graceful metalwork gates.
Unfortunately, during my trip, the gates were beautiful, but closed to visitors, and I didn’t get to see interior scenes such as this one of the main lobby.
