Blog 6


Cooper Robards

April 2. 2023

Blog 6

  This past week my girlfriend Ella came to visit me. The week was without a doubt a highlight in my trip so far, as I was just starting to get homesick.  What made her visit even more fun was doing some of the touristy things I had pushed off or simply not gotten around to doing. I felt like I was experiencing parts of Berlin for the first time with her.  Until her being here, I had not yet gone on top of the tv tower. Not only did we go up but we had dinner- which was amazing.  It was interesting to see the city from above. Although I had seen it through the window of a plane or on top the Berlin Royal Palace, neither compared to the rotating view of the tv tower. Having been here for a while it was cool being able to recognize many areas from above and see how some were much closer than I thought.  It also gave me a greater sense of the horizontality of the city.  Most buildings have a uniform height of 22 meters, with the occasional high-rise mixed in. Unlike in Paris where the uniformity in height was a design choice implemented with Hausman's redesign of the city, Berlin's uniformity in height has an incredibly obvious and practical explanation: egress.  When many of the old Berlin buildings were being, made fire ladders could only reach 22 meters tall.  Also, when looking at nollie maps of the city you can see the influence of egress on the shapes of buildings as well. They are often organized with large courtyard spaces in the middle of blocks so fire trucks can access and evacuate the entire buildings in case of emergency. This is another major difference between European and American architecture.  


    

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