Johanniterstr. 5: plant-happy apartment house

I sometimes visit a friend of mine at Johanniterstr. 5 in Berlin-Kreuzberg and the building always makes me smile. It’s a U-shaped apartment building that is both very Modernist and quite friendly-looking. Though it’s made of pre-poured gray cement slabs like many of its severe-looking counterparts in East Berlin (and also in Gropiusstadt, see below), its chubby, rounded white balconies and bright-yellow windowframes give it a cute, cheerful appearance. It also doesn’t hurt that the building’s proportions are modest – just 5 floors – or that it is home to many plants, in unexpected places and forms.

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Plants in Gropiusstadt, Berlin’s “garden city”

3 Feburary 2008
Near Hugo-Heimann-Str, Gropiusstadt, Berlin

For one week in February, I was an artist-in-residence in Gropiusstadt, a settlement in southwest Berlin. Gropiusstadt was conceived as a modern “garden city” with a mix of houses and apartment buildings, in a green oasis of lawns and trees, at the edge of the city. The area ended up being much more densely constructed than the original planner, Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius had intended, but there is still much more green and many more trees than elsewhere in the city.

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