We have a weird hobby. (Okay, several weird hobbies, but let’s stay focused.) We like to go to foreign cities on Google Street View and just cruise the streets. What does this place really look like? Not just the landmarks, the museums and government buildings – what is the normal day-to-day impression of a place?
When you do this in Berlin, either digitally or in real life, you’ll see an unceremonious mishmash of residential architecture. Not unexpected, when the country wages two world wars and loses badly, perpetrates a genocide, founds a new country that collapses after 40 years, and then becomes, despite everything, an attractive place for people to move to. You can read the city’s history even better in its normal apartment buildings than you can in its grand monuments. Each one of Berlin’s ordinary workhorse apartment buildings is full of style, personality, and ideology.
To share a piece of Berlin with you, we’ve made you some mini Berlin apartment buildings. Use them to make a Christmas scene or a decorative centerpiece. Decorate your mantelpiece. Make a streetscape for your kid’s Hot Wheels cars, or a city for their T. Rex to destroy. Don’t worry, Berlin can take it, it’s seen worse.
– Molly & Casey, Christmas 2022, Prenzlauer Berg
Download Buildings (A4) - 10.5 MB Download Buildings (US Letter) - 10.8 MB
Instructions
Download and print one of the PDFs. If possible, print on heavier-weight paper (200 g/m2).
Cut out the building shape.
Score along all straight lines. This means: using a knife blade, gently scratch each fold line along a ruler. Don’t cut all the way through!
Put glue on the leftmost flap.
Press the building into a box, folding along the scored lines. Fold the top and bottom flaps in. You can glue them if you want, but you don’t have to; the small slits on the top flap should “lock” the top and bottom into place.
Fine print
The real buildings have more floors than the models. We took some floors out because we wanted to fit the models on one A4 page.
The real buildings are not boxes: they have rooftop buildouts, balconies, wings, and bay windows. To make these models simple and fast to build, we made everything into a box.
Box template from templatemaker.nl.
Build Your Own Berlin by Molly Wilson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.