Brandenburg Gate
— the gate the city closes and opens around.
Not only on a wall.
“The neoclassical gate at the head of Unter den Linden, finished in 1791 to a design by Carl Gotthard Langhans. The bronze quadriga above it, driven by the goddess Victoria, was carried to Paris by Napoleon and brought back twelve years later. For twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the gate stood in no-man's-land behind the Berlin Wall. It reopened in December 1989.
Brandenburg Gate, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Brandenburg Gate stands at the western end of Pariser Platz in central Berlin, at the head of Unter den Linden and on the eastern edge of the Tiergarten park. It was commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia as a city gate and completed in 1791 to a design by Carl Gotthard Langhans. The structure is twenty-six metres tall, sixty-five metres wide, and built of Elbe sandstone in a neoclassical form modelled on the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis. The Reichstag lies a short walk to the north.
The gate is built of Elbe sandstone quarried in Saxony, weathered to a soft pale gray-brown over two centuries. Twelve Doric columns, six on each side, support the entablature; the original guardhouses still flank the structure. Sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow modelled the bronze quadriga of Victoria above the cornice between 1789 and 1793. The structure took bullet and shell damage during the Battle of Berlin in 1945 and was repaired in stages through the postwar decades; the quadriga itself was recast in 1958 from prewar plaster casts held in West Berlin.
The gate stands in open public space and can be approached at any hour of the day or night. The closest U-Bahn station is Brandenburger Tor on the U5, served also by S-Bahn lines beneath Pariser Platz. The Holocaust Memorial lies a short walk south, the Reichstag a short walk north. A small visitor information centre operates on the south side of the square. New Year's Eve is celebrated here with one of Europe's largest open-air concerts, drawing crowds along the full length of the Tiergarten axis.