Architecture in Berlin: Schaubühne

Summer seems so far away, especially when regardless of the time of the day, I see only darkness out of my clean windows. Words are my beams of light for the next weeks and months and early darkness will bring me home faster to finish my writing delayed for happy weather reasons. After discovering Eric Mendelsohn a couple of months ago, I wanted to see more of his works. The closest from me was Schaubühne..

The building complex is situated on Ku'damm, close to Halensee at Lehninenplatz and it hosts cultural events only from the beginning of the 1980s. When was inaugurated in 1928, it was part of a multi-functional urban structure called at the time WOGA. Where nowadays is the theatre used to be the Cinema Universum, the center of a structure that included coffees, a restaurants and apartments. If one tries to make a tour around the building, will feel like going around a huge ship. Opposite the cinema used to be Café Leon, a cabaret of the Jewish bohema. 

Seriously damaged during the war, the cinema was renamed Capital and newly inaugurated after serious reconstruction work coordinated by a former student of Mendelsohn, Hermann Fehling. In the crazy 1970s, here was the meeting place of many hippies and beatniks, as the area turned into a Broadway of Berlin.

The new face of the complex is the result of intensive work of Jürgen Sawade. The structure of the theatre was projected in order to cope with various innovative direction ideas. It even has a kabuki stage, for instance. Nowadays, the sober brown bricks of the building - protected monument since the end of the 1970s - is a mysteriously sober piece of architecture in the luxury urban context of Ku'damm. The next stage for me is to go to see a play here.