Design
In Berlin, a Shopping Mall's Flop Leads to Schadenfreude
A group of Berlin nightclub owners are now joking about turning the failing Mall of Berlin into a "techno temple." Here's why.
At just three months old, Berlin’s biggest new monument is still a baby. A big baby, mind you: It’s a vast, airy space capped with a vaulted glass roof and lined with galleried tiers, standing in the city’s center and overlooking the space where border guards used to patrol the Berlin Wall’s death strip. This lofty, much-discussed building of five million square feet isn’t a memorial or a museum, however. It’s a mall.
Not just any mall, mind you, but the hubristically named Mall of Berlin—the largest Germany’s capital has ever seen, including not only shops but (as yet unfinished) apartments and a hotel. And guess what? While it’s only been open since the autumn, the whole project is already bombing.