I just took a ride
in a silver machine
and I'm still feeling mean…..
(Hawkwind)

Berlin has some of the grooviest buildings around. Especially lovers of the 1970s can find all manner of weird and way out locations to check out.

I was out and about in Berlin's Wild West the other day and found myself outside the Berlin ICC. This is one of my favourite buildings in Berlin and so I popped in again to soak up the atmos…….

The ICC is a congress machine that lurks next to the city autobahn like a psychedelic Star Ship waiting to take guests on a cruise to the other side of the galaxy.

Built at the end of the seventies this masterpiece, which pretty near deserves the title “Gesamtkunstwerk”, has survived the years unmolested by “improvements”.





Walking up to this Leviathon can feel a bit like being in a scene from “blade runner” and there are funky tunnels that you half expect to see James Bond running out of persued by hundreds of guys in orange jump suits firing sub machine guns.

The enormous interiors are full of period patterned carpet, neon deco-lighting and funky information boards that would certainly not be out of place on the star ship enterprise. Everything is individually designed and styled and nothing just “off the shelf”. Even the toilets are a mini art work on their own.

Of course like most real works of art, the ICC has plenty of people who would like to see the back of it. There are repeated plans to rip it down and replace it with some bland new “functional, economic, and flexible alternative” (probably like the endlessly dreary and gross “0-2 Arena” here – and what a pile of sh*te that building is..)

You can get in and wander around on most days when there’s a trade fair ("Messe Berlin") on. So if you are in town, take the S-Bahn to “Westkreuz” station and check this mind bending space cruiser out, before the Maniacs and Philistines get their way.. …..

Link to Wiki for info (german)

Link to a very 70s film made about the ICC at the time it was built