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After the new year celebrations it was time to leave Berlin again. I got to use the new main railway station for the first time. It really is quite huge – with two levels of tracks in perpendicular directions – but yet it seems open and friendly. I left from the lower level, where they made an effort to cleanly cover the area between the tracks and to somehow fix the overhead lines to a fixed bar above the tracks, giving things an even cleaner look without all the support structures that are usually needed to keep the lines in position.
Of course I also had a look at the much discussed flaws in the building that were introduced by Deutsche Bahn management thanks to their lack of taste and money and which ended up in a big row and a court case between the railway company and the architect. And for sure the altered parts of the railway station look crappy. But then again, it’s a frigging railway station, not a piece of art. And I find it hard to be enraged about it – considering that when working for real money, ‘artists’ like architects should mainly bend over for their monied clients rather than pursuing their vanity problems. I thought that’s the way it works in good old capitalism. But strangely – in this case – with copyright and all that nonsense it currently looks like the courts think otherwise.