Summer is over so I thought it would be good to start posting some of my photos from my travels from the previous summer. In 2023, I started my three months of traveling in Shanghai, China for two weeks. There we scooted and biked around the city and ate all sorts of spicy noodles and dumplings, had street food, pastries and baked goods and ate a variety of fruits daily while visiting a few galleries and seeing some sights and breaking into abandoned neighborhoods.

Afterwards, I flew to Berlin for two months where I worked on some small art jobs, while exploring the city by bike and foot. I did a fair bit adventuring by myself, taking photos of the interesting areas and cool places. One such place is the tree-like, retro-futuristic of the brutalist architecture of the Bierpinsel.

The Bierpinsel, in the Stieglitz neighbourhood in outer Berlin, was constructed by architect couple (at least at the start of the project) Ursula and Ralph Schuler. This pop art take on brutalism, looking straight out of Blade Runner, is constructed with concrete, formed plastic and paint. I love that this monolithic tower looms over the highway and shopping mall.

Abandoned since 2010, it opened and closed multiple times as a both club and restaurant since its doors first opened in 1976. In its last life it was painted by street artists Honest and Sozyone Gonzales. There are no current plans for reopening and this building so it could continue to decay. Luckily the neighbour it is in is affluent so hope is that as the area is gentrified its interesting design will be see it turned into something interesting to match the aesthetics of the architecture.

In the same day that I saw the Bierpinsel, I also visited another brutalist building the Mausbunker, a disused animal testing facility that looks like an angular battleship stuck on land. After I spent hours nearby at nature reserve in an old German, Nazi, and then Soviet train yard which was abandoned in the 1950s once the city was divided in the Cold War.

I hope you enjoy the photos of this interesting building. The day I took these photos I also visited another brutalist building, Mäusebunker, and abandoned and imposing animal testing facility and Natur-Park Südgelände, a once abandoned train depot, which was reclaimed by nature and eventual turned into a nature reserve.