Brandenburg Gate

The Brandenburg Gate stands on the east-west axis of Berlin's grand boulevards, a neoclassical propylaeum modelled on the Propylaea of the Athens Acropolis and built between 1788 and 1791 under the direction of Carl Gotthard Langhans, commissioned by Prussian King Frederick William II. It was the first great monument of the reunited city and remains its most potent symbol.

Twelve Doric columns, each 11.3 metres tall, rise to support a horizontal entablature and an attic storey; above the whole runs Langhans's quadriga — a bronze chariot drawn by four horses and guided by Victoria, goddess of peace, carrying an iron cross and an oak wreath that symbolises the promise of peace after war. The gate was the ceremonial endpoint of the Boulevard Unter den Linden and appeared in every Napoleonic victory parade after 1806, when Napoleon marched through it with the captured quadriga as a trophy.

After German unification in 1871 it became a symbol of imperial might, its equestrian reliefs and allegorical sculptures representing the martial virtues of the Prussian state. The Berlin Wall ran less than 200 metres north of it, and for twenty-eight years the gate stood in the death strip, fenced off and inaccessible to the citizens it was built to serve. The gate became the symbol of the city's division; from below it, what could be seen was not the goddess of peace but wire mesh and guard towers.

On 9 November 1989, when the Wall fell, hundreds of thousands of east and west Berliners flooded toward it; the gate became the emotional centre of reunification and has since hosted every major national celebration, from the 1990 unity ceremony to the 2006 World Cup final when Germany hosted. The sculptures on the attic storey show scenes from Greek mythology — the departure of a hero, a battle of the Amazons — designed by Johann Gottfried Schadow.

The gate has no original surviving colour: Langhans's own drawings suggest it was never painted in antiquity, and the sand-coloured sandstone that survives is the natural tone of the stone. The Quadriga was taken to Paris by Napoleon in 1806 as a trophy of war and returned in 1814 after Prussia's liberation; the original iron cross and oak wreath were replaced in 1953 after wartime damage, and the whole ensemble was fully restored after 1990 reunification.

Walking through the gate toward the Tiergarten, one passes from the 18th-century city into Berlin's central park and the 21st-century metropolis that grew up around this neoclassical monument, a journey through layers of German history compressed into a single step. The Tiergarten behind it, once a hunting ground of the Electors of Brandenburg, is now a public park of 210 hectares.

It is the defining symbol of German reunification, standing at the exact point where the Wall divided the city and where the Wall fell.

The quadriga and the neoclassical proportions are an architectural reference point in European urban design.

The surrounding Pariser Platz and Unter den Linden boulevard connect it to some of Berlin's most important cultural institutions.