Architecture critic Rowan Moore takes a stroll around some of Berlin’s best known buildings…

Buildings, in Berlin, tend not to be just buildings. They are manifestos, propaganda, memorials, battlefields. It is the city whose Wall was one of the most political works of architecture of all time.

The confrontation of superpowers was condensed into Berlin’s urban form, and the apartment blocks in the old eastern and western halves are imprinted with competing ideologies.

Nazism, Communism, social democracy and capitalism have all felt the need to say it with buildings. The biggest names of modern architecture also left their mark: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto.

In the 1920s new ideas in architecture fomented there and, since the fall of the Wall, contemporary stars such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers have been invited in.

A good place to start a tour of highlights is the Kulturforum, where large sums were invested in cultural monuments by West Germany’s government in order to boost West Berlin and to demonstrate its superior commitment to the highest works of civilisation.

The most spectacular of these monuments is the Philharmonie of 1963, designed by Hans Scharoun and the home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Its swooping, freeform design and gold-coloured cladding anticipate by some decades the “iconic” architecture of the 1990s and 2000s.

Unlike some of the latter it is bold but not bombastic—there is a lightness and sensitivity about it, with an awareness of the flows of people which makes it a delight to walk through. Above all, there is the 2,440-seat auditorium, with irregular terraces of seating which Scharoun described as “vineyards”. Nearby is a library also by Scharoun, and a striking science centre in pink and blue stripes by James Stirling.

There is also the New National Gallery of 1968, which is the polar opposite of the concert hall. It is solemn, temple-like, black, symmetrical, perfect, elegant, chilly. It is a late work of van der Rohe and one of his most extreme. Most of the art is buried in its stone plinth rather than the steel-and-glass superstructure, and van der Rohe confessed he’d have liked it if it had contained no art whatsoever, apart from a single Brancusi bird in its dead centre.

From the Kulturforum you can walk to Potsdamer Platz, once the centre…