BRIGITTA ANTON

It was taken from the balcony of a friend's flat in East Berlin. It shows a very old and crumbling building (pre-East Germany) surrounded by other distinctly different buildings. On the other side (I should really scan in the other picture as well) is a typical East German building, a so-called Plattenbau ("Platte" meaning concrete square, and the outside of East German apartment blocks were characterised by those squares).

The image shows a city in the process of transformation, especially in the former East German part, where as yet the very old neglected pre-East German buildings exist side by side with East German architecture and newly-built high-tech "western"-style buildings. This part of Berlin is changing nearly by the week, and nothing stays the same. However, a lot of the old buildings (from the turn of the last century) will be preserved (so they say), because the western part does not have many of those left.