Potsdamer Platz is the most rebuilt place in Berlin — Europe's busiest square before the war, a no-man's-land in the Wall's shadow, then the Nineties' largest construction site. Two and a half kilometres later you reach the opposite of all that churn: a cluster of postwar buildings that quietly changed architecture.
Start on the square itself. Find the replica of the 1924 traffic tower — Europe's first traffic light — and the painted Wall slabs standing on the brick line that traces the border through the pavement. Then the Sony Center, Helmut Jahn's glass courtyard under a spoke-wheel roof; walk in and look straight up, which is what it's for. From there west into the Kulturforum.
This is the payoff. Scharoun's gold Berliner Philharmonie of 1963, the concert hall that broke the mould; Mies van der Rohe's glass-and-steel Neue Nationalgalerie, his last building, newly restored; and the Gemäldegalerie, room after hushed room of Vermeer and Rembrandt. Check opening days before you count on going in. End among the old masters and catch a bus from the square — the most thrown-away and the most carefully made parts of Berlin, back to back.
