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"View Slideshow\n\nBerlin used to be about trash style,\" says architect Ester Bruzkus. \"You bought everything at a flea market\u2014nobody cared. But that's changing.\" Change is a word you hear often in this restless, electric city, and no more so than in the center of the former Communist east, the Mitte district, where Bruzkus, one of Berlin's rising young architects, has been doing her latest work. Mitte has been many things since the Wall came down\u2014squatters' paradise, art-world laboratory, bohemian hideaway. Now, with an influx of chic hotels and restaurants and an ever-expanding gallery, shopping, and nightclub scene, the district is transforming again. For the first time in its recent history, Mitte feels sophisticated, rich, and polished.\n\nMitte is already on the tourist map, thanks to Museum Island; the grand boulevard, Unter den Linden, that leads to the Brandenburg Gate; and a proliferation of international shopping\u2014from A.P.C. to Gucci to Kiehl's to Bottega Veneta. But the neighborhood rewards exploration: Walk the intimate streets striped with tram rails and you'll stumble across homegrown fashion boutiques, galleries in hidden courtyards, and friendly locavore caf\u00E9s. You'll also see a few graffiti-covered entryways, even a prostitute or two\u2014this is the former East Berlin, after all. (\"The difference is that here they dress like Barbarella,\" says Philomene Magers of Mitte's blue-chip art gallery Spr\u00FCth Magers.) It's this collision between the neighborhood's gritty past and its cosmopolitan present that gives Mitte its energy. On a recent visit, AD culled a selection of the area's latest and lesser-known offerings\u2014where to stay, eat, and shop, and what to see and do."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/berlin-germany-guide-article>