Hamburger Bahnhof

Stand for a moment on the forecourt and listen. Behind you, trains glide in and out of the glass bulk of Berlin's main station. In front of you rises a pale, quiet building with two square towers and a wide arched entrance. The gravel and paving underfoot feel calm after the traffic of Invalidenstraße. If you arrive after dark, the façade glows with soft lines of blue and green light. It looks almost too gentle for a place that began as a railway terminus.

That is exactly what this was. The name means Hamburg Station, and it marked the Berlin end of the railway line to Hamburg. It opened in the 1840s, in the first decades of German rail travel. Trains were still new, noisy and a little frightening. Passengers stepped down here after a long journey across the flat northern plains. The building you see is one of the oldest surviving railway station buildings in Berlin, and one of the earliest of its kind anywhere in Germany.

Look at the shape of the front. The style is late classical, calm and symmetrical, with the two towers framing a central hall. In the early railway age, architects often dressed stations like city gates or palaces. A station was a new kind of building, and nobody was sure yet what it should look like. So they borrowed the dignity of older forms. Here, the result feels more like a small country residence than a place of steam and coal.

The railway career of this building was surprisingly short. Within a few decades, Berlin's rail network grew and changed. Traffic to Hamburg moved to the larger Lehrter Bahnhof nearby, and in the 1880s this terminus closed to passengers. For a while it served for offices and housing. Then, in the early twentieth century, it found a new life. It became a museum of transport and building, full of locomotives, models and engineering displays.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The site of that busier neighbouring station, the Lehrter Bahnhof, is where today's Berlin Hauptbahnhof stands. So the old rival of this building is now the city's newest and largest railway hub, just a short walk away. Two centuries of rail history sit side by side here. One building kept its old shape and changed its purpose. The other site kept its purpose and changed its shape completely.

The Second World War brought heavy damage to this area, and the museum closed. After the war, the city was divided. This building stood in West Berlin, but the railway land around it was controlled by the East German state railway. That odd arrangement left the building in limbo for decades. Its collection of trains and models stayed locked inside, and the halls slowly decayed. Very few Berliners went inside during those Cold War years.

After the city was reunited, the story turned again. The building was restored and converted into a museum for contemporary art, and it opened in this new role in 1996. The architect Josef Paul Kleihues led the conversion. He kept the historic front and the tall main hall, and he added a long new wing with a clean, modern line. Today the museum is part of the Nationalgalerie, the national art gallery of Berlin's state museums.

Now look up at the façade again. Those glowing tubes of coloured light are a work by the American artist Dan Flavin. He made art from ordinary fluorescent lamps, the kind you might find in an office or a garage. Here, the lamps turn the old station into a lantern at night. It is a simple idea. The building's past stays visible in the stone, while the light announces its present life as a place for new art.

Step inside, and the main hall still carries the feeling of a station. The space is tall and long, with an iron and glass roof above you. Large installations often fill it, because few rooms in the city can hold works on this scale. Your voice and footsteps carry differently here. Many visitors pause at the threshold to adjust, the way travellers once paused after stepping off a train into a large, echoing hall.

The heart of the museum grew from a private collection assembled by the collector Erich Marx. It brought major works by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer and Cy Twombly. Beuys in particular has a strong presence. He was a German artist who used felt, fat and everyday materials, and he believed that art could reshape society. His work can seem puzzling at first. Give it time, and it often becomes the part people remember most.

Behind the main building stretch the Rieckhallen, long former freight sheds from the railway era. They were converted into gallery spaces, so the museum feels much larger than its front suggests. For a time their future was uncertain, and many in the art world campaigned to keep them. Here is a second surprise. In recent years the museum also took a longer name, Hamburger Bahnhof, National Gallery of the Present, which makes its focus on living art very clear.

Outside, the neighbourhood is still changing. The area around the main station has filled with new office blocks and apartments in recent years. A canal runs not far behind the museum, and quieter paths follow the water. Within a short walk you move between eras: an early railway building, a glass station from the twenty-first century, and new streets that did not exist a generation ago. It is a good place to see how Berlin keeps rebuilding itself.

Before you leave, turn back toward the entrance once more. Notice the two towers and the wide arch, built for travellers who arrived by steam. Notice the coloured light, added by an artist who worked with ordinary lamps. Listen to the trains from the main station behind you. This building has been a terminus, a museum of machines, an empty shell, and now a home for new art. Each time it changed, it kept its front to the street, still waiting to receive the next arrivals.