Berliners have a knack of taking a very unconventional space and putting something in it that really doesn’t belong there. Funnily enough, it is this incongruity which makes something work.

A few weekends ago I went to the Berlin Festival – the only festival of its kind that takes place in Berlin itself. It is still a mere baby in comparison to other festivals. It started out in 2005 and this year was the first year that it was held at Tempelhof Airport.

Tempelhof was designed by architect Ernst Sagebiel and built by the National Socialists between 1936 and 1941. Its design is typical of the Nazi monumental style – all towering concrete pillars and carved eagles. The roof apparently was constructed to hold up to 100,000 people watching military parades and air shows. It is an important monument in many ways, perhaps the most important being that it played a key role in the airlifts of 1948/49. Nicknamed the ‘”Candy Bar Rescue”, more than 5,000 tons of food and supplies were airlifted by the Allies everyday into West Berlin via Tempelhof during this period. This was a reaction to the decision the Soviet Union took in June 1948 to cut off all surface rail and street access to and from the western half of the city. An airlift memorial (Luftbrückdenkmal) erected to pay tribute to the 79 pilots who lost their lives during the airlift can be found outside Tempelhof in a suburb called Zehlendorf. Above is a photo taken when the blockade ended on the 11th May 1949.

Last Sunday, on the hottest Berlin day this year, I ventured into the cool vault of the Bunker in Mitte (Greifswalder Str. 23, 10437) to take a peek at the private art collection of Christian Boros. This is another example of taking a building with a significant (and significantly dark) history and converting it into a place of cultural value. The bunker reminded me of the Haus der Kunst in Münich – another example of repression (artistic and otherwise) being converted into artistic expression. The Nazis built the Bunker in 1941 to hold up to 2,000 local citizens. After this, the Russian Army occupied it before it became a textile factory and then a banana factory (hence it is sometimes called the ‘Banana Bunker’). In 1992, it was transformed into one of Berlin’s most infamous techno/fetish clubs before Boros bought it for a steal (our guide said that he bought it from the city for €1!), and converted it into a gallery space to house his private collection. He also converted the roof of the bunker into an ultra-modern penthouse apartment where he lives with his wife. Not a bad place to lay your hat, I must say.

In order to view the collection, you have to book about two months in advance. It is well worth it though. The collection itself is very modern and some pieces were slightly inaccessible in my opinion but the building itself was incredible. Such amazing clashes of darkness and light, of old and new. The ceilings of the original bunker cells have been lifted to make the gallery rooms more spacious, but you can see where the existing ceilings would have been. The paintwork on the walls also reveals the colourful history of the bunker – grey concrete, layered with fluorescent splashes and black from its techno days and then bleeding into the new white of the gallery.

This week, I also went to the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Niederkirchnerstraße 7 | Ecke Stresemannstr. 110 10963 Berlin) to see an exhibition on Le Corbusier – the famous French architect, writer and artist. The exhibition displayed the genius of the man and his vision and combined sculpture, paintings, drawings, architecture and furniture. If you haven’t seen any of his designs then check out this YouTube film.

Le Corbusier wanted to revolutionize modern urban living and designed a series of residential apartment blocks called ‘unité d’habitation’. One of these buildings was submitted for an architectural competition the ‘International Exhibition of Construction’ in Berlin in 1957 and was subsequently erected (and still stands) on a site south of the Olympic Stadium (Flatowallee 16 Berlin-Westend/U2 to Olympiastadium (Ost) or S-Bahn: Lines S75 or S9 to Olympiastadion). It is the only example of Le Corbussier’s architecture in Berlin.

Speaking of the Olympic stadium, Berlin has been taken over in the last week by hundreds of sickeningly fit people! I went to go for my usual run in Tiergarten the other day and was overtaken by professionals with legs that came up to my shoulders! Berlin is currently hosting the World Championships in athletics. I slipped away from the running track with my tail between my legs only to encounter the entire Korean athletic team in the park down the road from me doing the splits on the lawn!! Talk about make a girl feel bad!