Fotografiska Berlin & Kunsthaus Tacheles: How an Anarchist Art Squat Became Mitte’s Cultural Beacon
The striking, moody interior galleries of Fotografiska Berlin, housed within the meticulously restored shell of the historic Kunsthaus Tacheles on Oranienburger Straße. Few addresses in central Berlin tell the turbulent story of the city's 20th-century reinvention quite as vividly as Oranienburger Straße 54. Depending on who you ask, this hulking concrete-and-brick complex was once an opulent early 20th-century department store arcade, a Nazi administrative clearinghouse, a bombed-out postwar ruin slated for communist demolition, and for more than two decades, the wildest, most notorious anarchist art squat in reunified Europe: Kunsthaus Tacheles . Today, the building has entered its most ambitious chapter yet. Following a decade-long restoration by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron, the building reopened as Fotografiska Berlin —a 5,500-square-meter contemporary museum of photography and visual culture. Yet unlike sanitized corporate redevelopment ...