Potsdamer Platz

A square ringed by glass towers, cinemas, and a great tented roof rises where, within living memory, there was only the empty death strip of the wall. This is Potsdamer Platz, a modern quarter built almost from nothing in the years after reunification, and a symbol of the city's rebirth.

A century ago this was one of the busiest squares in Europe, a roaring hub of traffic, trams, and cafes. The war flattened it, and then the wall ran right across it, leaving the heart of the old square as a barren no-man's-land for decades.

After the wall fell, the empty space became the largest building site in Europe, and through the 1990s a whole new district of skyscrapers, offices, and entertainment rose on the wasteland, a deliberate stitching-together of the once-divided city.

The result is a quarter of bold modern architecture by famous international architects, glass-and-steel towers around a square, including a striking complex under a great tented glass roof that glows at night.

The district is a centre of cinema and entertainment, home to a major film festival, screens, theatres, and a museum of film, so it draws crowds for premieres and shows as well as for the architecture.

A few segments of the wall stand on the square as a reminder, and markers in the ground trace the line it once followed, so the history is not entirely erased beneath the new building.

It is, frankly, a modern commercial and business district rather than an old historic sight, and some find it sterile, but as a statement of how completely the city rebuilt itself, it is remarkable.

The contrast is the point: standing among the gleaming towers, it is hard to picture the empty, deadly strip that lay here so recently, and that disappearance is itself the story.

The square sits beside the great park and within reach of the central landmarks, so it folds into a day in the centre, a jump from the historic core into the rebuilt modern city.

After dark the towers and the tented roof are lit, and the district is at its most striking, busy with cinema-goers and diners under the glass.

Stand in the square among the glass towers, find the old wall segments and the line in the ground, and the speed of the city's reinvention sinks in. When you walk on toward the park, the modern quarter gives way again to the older, greener city.