When in Berlin I live a five-minute walk away from Alexanderplatz. The square has had a tumultuous past. Its glory days were in the early twentieth century when it was one of the busiest intersections in the city. Completely destroyed during the war, Alexanderplatz was rebuilt as a Socialist model square. Today, and quite synonymous with Berlin as a whole, there’s a lot of confusion over the future direction of urban planning.
Alexa shopping centre
We hit the road yesterday and visited a few places in the vicinity of my parents’ house in the countryside. The trip took us to Doemitz, birthplace of my mother, Ludwigslust, where my parents went to school and my sister was born, and a whole lot of villages in between. Herewith a few impressions.
I got married in Lenzen, a small town in the northwest of Brandenburg. My grandparents lived here, and my parents have now settled permanently nearby. Lenzen is situated near the river Elbe with its stunning national park. The town itself has a medieval centre that is slowly left to decay, a fate shared with many towns in this rather poor and depopulating part of Germany.
The Hague used to be my home for two and a half years. Altogether I lived in the Netherlands for almost four. I took a trip down Memory Lane last week and visited my former colleagues and some friends here.
We spent an afternoon with friends two weekends ago, first to see an exhibition in the Wellcome Collection near Euston Station followed by a stroll around Hyde Park. Here we walked past London’s possibly most exclusive real estate address (1 Hyde Park) on our way to this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavillon, designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto.
Serpentine Gallery Pavillon by Sou Fujimoto
This Art Deco building on Commercial Road near Shadwell DLR caught my eye when walking the area recently. Cheviot House was built in 1937 for textile merchants called Kornberg & Segal. The local Tower Hamlets borough apparently has plans to demolish the building and earmark the plot for new residential development.
I briefly passed by Seven Sisters this weekend to catch the Victoria Line. The Wards Corner Building below is a former department store that has been slated for demolition for some while. A regeneration project is bound to transform the whole area.
The ancient temples of Bagan are another highlight on Myanmar’s tourist trail. While not as known internationally as say Angkor Wat, the 2,000-odd temples that litter this 26-mile plateau in central Burma are no less impressive. Most of them date back to the 11-13th centuries AD and frequent earthquakes and general decay left many of them in a state of disrepair. Until Burma’s junta embarked on its controversial beautification project. 
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It’s been a while that I wrote about my book project on some of Tokyo’s iconic 60s/70s buildings. Work has been ongoing over the last couple of months and the project has been growing in scope and depth. There is now four confirmed chapters written by four different authors. Architectural photographer Manuel Oka has started taking shots of the buildings. Here are some of his photos:
Yangon has plenty of dilapidated but more or less intact colonial-era architecture. Decades of international isolation saved the city from masses of overzealous real estate developers. As Burma is opening up, people have begun to wonder whether this heritage can be kept alive.
