Peter Ortner Livres

Tegel Airport, opened in 1974 in West Berlin, was not only finished under budget and on time but today also remains an impressive work of art. For their design of the terminal, the architects chose the figure of a large hexagon with edges of 120 meters. A sophisticated use of space created an “airport of short distances,” with as little as twenty-eight meters between the doors of the cars and the aircraft. In 2020, TXL was closed. Photographer Peter Ortner captures his uniquely personal view of the airport complex with the remnants of its past glory―the details so familiar to anyone who has traveled through or waited inside Tegel.

Bilingual edition (English/German) / Zweisprachige Ausgabe (deutsch/englisch) Bus stops are normally mundane structures, standardized and replaceable and therefore scarcely paid any attention. However, on the country roads of the former Soviet republics there are many unexpected waiting zones—a wide-ranging panoply of socialist architecture. The photographer Peter Ortner shows a small selection of such bus stops in this book. The photographs were taken both in Central Asia and in Eastern Europe, from Uzbekistan to Armenia, and illuminate the imaginative variations on this vernacular architecture. His shots present us with an endless variety of forms and colors; an eclectic micro architecture, which gains a diffuse charm through neglect and weathering. Anonymous architects created special buildings for an everyday purpose. For waiting.