Pariser Platz

Pariser Platz is the square that closes Berlin's grand boulevard Unter den Linden at the Brandenburg Gate, in the Mitte district. Laid out in 1734 under Frederick William I as part of the city expansion, it was renamed in 1814 to celebrate the Prussian troops' march into Paris after the Napoleonic Wars. The square was almost completely destroyed in 1945, with only the gate left standing, and from 1961 to 1989 lay directly behind the Wall in the death strip, a barren no-man's-land for nearly three decades. Since the 1990s reconstruction it has filled again with the US and French embassies, the Hotel Adlon, Frank Gehry's DZ Bank and Christian de Portzamparc's DG Bank building. Strict Senate building codes prescribe stone facades and punched windows, a deliberate echo of the pre-war scale that makes the square feel oddly historical despite its newness.