Federal Chancellery and the Spreebogen
Why is it significant?
Across the lawn rises a big white cube with a huge round window cut into its face, flanked by long low wings stretching towards the river. Berliners took one look and called it the Waschmaschine... the washing machine.
Key Facts
| Place | Federal Chancellery and the Spreebogen |
|---|---|
| Address | Willy-Brandt-Straße 1, 10557 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52020, 13.36910 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Dome and Golden Angel: Berlin's Reichstag, Tiergarten & Victory Column |
| Generated | Generated |
Across the lawn rises a big white cube with a huge round window cut into its face, flanked by long low wings stretching towards the river. Berliners took one look and called it the Waschmaschine... the washing machine. It is the Bundeskanzleramt, the office of the German chancellor, designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank and finished in 2001.
Stand back and you can see the bigger idea. The Chancellery is one end of a long strip of government buildings called the Band des Bundes, the Federal Ribbon, which runs east to west and leaps across the Spree twice. For almost three decades the Wall cut through this part of Berlin from north to south, only a few hundred metres east of here. So the architects stitched the city back together with a ribbon running the other way.
This loop of the river is called the Spreebogen, and before the war it was a smart quarter of villas and embassies. Then Albert Speer began clearing it for Hitler's capital Germania. Right about here was to stand the Great Hall, a domed building planned to be close to three hundred metres tall, big enough to hold over a hundred and fifty thousand people. It was never built, but the demolitions and the bombs left the whole bend empty.
Look east, towards the river and the Reichstag, and you will spot one small, old, lonely building standing on its own. That is the Swiss Embassy, the only survivor of the old quarter. Switzerland simply refused to sell, the war ended before the bulldozers arrived, and today it sits beside the chancellor like a stubborn neighbour who never moved out.
Not every chancellor wanted to live above the shop. There is a flat on the top floor, but Angela Merkel famously preferred to keep living in her own apartment across town. The chancellor's garden lies across the Spree, reached by a private bridge. From here, follow the river path west for a few steps, to a white building whose roof sweeps up like a giant shell.