ITINERARY

 

Day 1: Sunday July 28, 2019 - You leave the US on the airline of your choice (not included) to Berlin Tegel Airport (TXL)

 

Day 2 - Monday July 29, 2019 - L1-D1 - Berlin Night 1: 

Arrive in Berlin.

Taken from Airport to Hotel. Dinner together -  

 

Day 3: Tuesday July 30 - B1-L2 - Berlin Night 2:   

Berlin: All sorts of amazing places to visit although we know that we won't be able to visit all:

On Museum Island there are: Altes Museum (Old Museum), Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery), Pergamon Museum, and Bode Museum. Apart from the Museum Island, there are a wide variety of other museums, about 150 more.

The Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, specializes in 20th century European painting.

 

Deutsches Historisches Museum offers an overview of German history through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It has an added building designed by I.M. Pei.

 

The Jewish Museum has a standing exhibition on two millennia of German-Jewish history. The addition designed by Daniel Libeskind is extraordinary and one of the highlights of a Berlin visit.

 

The site of Checkpoint Charlie, one of the renowned crossing points of the Berlin Wall, is still preserved and also has a museum, a private venture which exhibits a comprehensive array of material about people who devised ingenious plans to flee the East. 

 

There are seven symphony orchestras in Berlin, but the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is one of the preeminent orchestras in the world; it is housed in the Berliner Philharmonie near Potsdamer Platz on a street named for the orchestra's longest-serving conductor, Herbert von Karajan. Its architect, Hans Scharoun designed what may be the best acoustically designed symphony hall. The current principal conductor is Kirill Petrenko. 

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We will have dinner on the roof of the Reichstag, the German Parliament Building which was restored by Norman Foster in 1999.

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Day 4 - Wednesday July  31 - B2-L3 - Berlin Night 3:

We will visit the Russian side of Berlin, which has seen gentrification since the fall of the Wall. there are some great coffee shops,  but also interesting sites to visit, including a series of apartment buildings designed by Walter Gropius.

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Day 5: Thursday August 1, 2019 - B3, L4, D2 - Berlin Night 4: 

More interesting things to see in Berlin, like the works of many important architects, past and present: Zaha Hadid, Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind, Walter Gropius, Hans Sharoun, Erich Mendelsohn, Norman Foster, Le Corbusier, Jean Nouvel, Sauerbruch Hutton, Aldo Ross, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Pei-Cobb, Philip Johnson, Peter Berhens. Dinner with the group.

 

 

Day 6: Friday August 2, 2019 - B4, L5, D3 - Wolfsburg Night 1: 

We are going to Wolfsburg to visit the Phaeno Building designed by Zaha Hadid. "The Phæno builing in the centre of Wolfsburg looks like a spacecraft that has just landed. Resting on its ten cone-shaped “feet”, the concrete structure spanning 154 metres seems to almost hover in the air - The imposing structure sits enthroned high above street-level. The exhibition space, resting on conic supports and sublimely illuminated, liberates the area beneath in a kind of urban space in the form of a covered artificial landscape with gently undulating hills and valleys. Since November 2005, the futuristic apparition has been raising eyebrows in amazement and making eyes gleam with awe among passers-by. The inside of Phæno is a free-flowing space framed by cast concrete, without any right angles, entwined over several levels. Phæno is about touching, trying things out, finding astonishment, playing, exploring, discovering, and above all: unraveling the frequently mysterious natural-scientific phenomena of everyday life on one´s own initiative. Over 300 phenomena can be marveled at in Phæno”. It is worth the trip.

Then on to the Wolkwagen Autostadt, which is a kind of Disney World of all the different brands owned under that name: Audi, Bugatti, Seat, Skoda, Lamborghini, etc. The interesting about it, is the architecture of each pavilion, the landscape, all having been designed with an attention to Green Architecture and sustainable planning. And there also a very interesting pavilion with a good collection of old cars.

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The Wolfsburg Library/Cultural Center which was designed by Alvaar Alto between 1959 and 1962 is really a fantastic building in its design and floor planning. Dinner with the group.

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Day 7: Saturday August 3, 2019 - B5, L6, D4 - Dessau Night 1

 we will be going to Magdeburg to visit the Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg “an oasis for humanity and nature in a sea of rational houses” designed in 2005 by Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

According to Friedensreich Hundertwasser, architecture is a human being’s ‘3rd skin’, and he believed that every human should be able to choose and configure it as they can fashion their 1st skin (natural skin) and their 2nd skin (clothing). Through his architectural projects and the “window right” and “tree obligation” concepts, he worked towards creating individual living spaces at one with nature. He considered the task of leading human beings back to the lost paradise central to an architect’s responsibility. Dinner with the group.

 

Day 8: Sunday August 4, 2019 - B6, L7, D5 - Dessau Night 2

The Bauhaus was obliged to leave Weimar in 1925 on orders of the new city government which was affiliated with the Nazi party. It moved to Dessau, still a more liberal city. It is where Walter Gropius designed his most famous buildings: the Bauhaus class rooms and workshop building and the students housing as well as houses for the teachers. We will visit all of those. I had the pleasure to visit those when Dessau was still part the Soviet controlled Germany, and twice after that. For anyone interested in the history of modern architecture, it is like a pilgrimage. 

We will also the Dessau–Törten Housing Estate development that the Bauhaus designed for factory workers. 324 town houses were built each with its own 3500 sq ft kitchen garden.  But there are a few more thing s to see in Dessau.

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Day 9: Monday August 5, 2019 - B7, L8, D6 - Postdam Night 1

Driving to Postdam (1 hr), a residence of the Prussian kings and the German Kaiser until 1918. Its planning embodied ideas of the Age of Enlightenment: through a careful balance of architecture and landscape.

The Cecilienhof Palace was the scene of the Potsdam Conference from 17 July to 2 August 1945, at which the victorious Allied leaders (Harry S. Truman; Winston Churchill and his successor, Clement Attlee; and Joseph Stalin) met to decide the future of Germany and postwar Europe in general.

There is the famous Einstein tower. Its telescope supports experiments and observations to validate (or disprove) Albert Einstein's relativity theory. This was one of Mendelsohn's first major projects and his best-known building, completed when a young Richard Neutra was on his staff. Dinner with the group.

 

Day 10: Tuesday August 6, 2019 - B8, L9 - Berlin Night 5:

In 1744, King Frederick the Great ordered the construction of a residence, where he could live sans souci ("without worries", in the French spoken at the court). The park hosts a botanical garden garden and many buildings:

• The Sanssouci Palace (Schloss Sanssouci), a relatively modest palace of the Prussian royal and later German imperial families.

• The Orangery Palace (Orangerieschloss), former palace for foreign royal guests

• The New Palace (Neues Palais), built between 1763 and 1769 to celebrate the end of the Seven Years' War, in which Prussia held off the combined attacks of Austria and Russia. It is a much larger and grander palace than Sanssouci, having over 200 rooms and 400 statues as decoration. It served as a guest house for numerous royal visitors. Today, it houses parts of University of Potsdam.

• The Charlottenhof Palace (Schloss Charlottenhof), a Neoclassical palace by Karl Friedrich Schinkel built in 1826

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​Day 11: Wednesday August 7, 2019 - B9, L10, D7 -  Berlin night 6:

We are back in Berlin to visit the The Bauhaus Archive, the architecture museum, which will still be of interest to us. It was Walter Gropius' last design for a building. And to the magnificent Charlottenburg Palace, located just out of the center of the city. More surprise are in for that day too.

Night in Berlin. Farewell dinner with the group.

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Day 12: Thursday August 8, 2019 - B10

You will be driven to the Berlin Tegel Airport (TXL). You will be home by late afternoon.