In 1995 the Bulgarian-French artist couple of Christo and Jeanne-Claude  wrapped the German parliament building or reichstag in polypropylene fabric. A billboard in the Brandenburger Tor U-Bahn station in Berlin displays an image of the epic artwork.

There’s an entertaining photo essay titled “The Mullets of Medellin” in the second issue of the Green Soccer Journal, an intelligent, refreshingly creative English magazine devoted to football culture. The feature has 22 photos of soccer players from Medellin, Colombia who sport the short-in-the-front-long-in-the-back hairstyle. The essay was written by Rainbow Nelson with photography by Stefan Ruiz. Great stuff.

The minimal, beautifully designed clock in a Berlin U-Bahn (subway) station.

Poster in the Berlin neighborhood of Kruezberg for the “Temptation to be Good” art exhibition of works by artist Mercedes Helnwein at the Pool Gallery.

Some more station name signs from the Berlin U-Bahn. We love how each station’s signs are distinct in typography, design, spacing and color.

Street art in Berlin: From the platform of Eberswalder-strasse U-Bahn Station, you can see a massive mural of a cartoon bear running across the side of an apartment building in Prenzlauer-Berg. Love it.

As noted in a previous post, the symbol of the city of Berlin is a little bear.

A large collection of arty bears statues in the Ku’Damm area of Charlottenberg in Berlin. The figures are part of the United Bears Project and are dotted throughout Berlin. The project was launched in German capital in 2002. There are 140 bears in the city and these have traveled around the world to five continents to promote global peace initiatives. Each of the bears represents a country or city. The bear itself is significant for Berlin as it is the symbol of the city and appears on its flag and has been integrated into various logos and designs.

An exhibition about the Berlin Wall at the site of the former Checkpoint Charlie border-crossing in Kruezberg near Mitte shows documentary photographs of the late American artist Keith Haring famously painting the wall in the 1980s. Some of the images are from the archives of the former stasi or East German secret police.

Mysterious logo stencil street art in the Hackescher Market area of Mitte, Berlin.

The massive, spacious, glass-sheathed central train station or hauptbahnhof in Berlin.

Large street-art painting of Marlon Brando’s iconic image from the Francis Ford Coppola film “The Godfather” in the Hackescher Market area of Mitte, Berlin.

We stumbled upon this super-colorful apartment building in the western part of Kreuzberg in Berlin. With a few coats of paint, an ordinarily drab and plain building has been transformed into a local landmark.

The haunting “West” and “Ost” (“East”) mirrors in the epic grand staircase at the Martin Gropius Bau art museum in Mitte, in Berlin. The museum’s location is on a street that was once the border along which the infamous Berlin Wall ran. The Wall was literally a stone’s throw from the where the “Ost” mirror now hangs.

More Berlin street art in Hackescher Market, in the Scheunenviertel area of Mitte.

More street art in the Hackescher Market area of Mitte, in central Berlin. Here the historical icon Karl Marx and his street-arty character “friend.”

There’s a lot of street art in the gallery-theater compound tucked into a back-alley courtyard off Rosenthaler Strasse in the Hackescher Market area of Berlin.  Below is an illustration-styled painting a girl with pink hair, reminiscent of a character in a Japanese comic book (“manga”) or graphic novel.

Street art in a courtyard alley in the Hackescher Market of Mitte in Berlin: This black-and-white human-scale poster of an illustrated cat says “I’m not free.” The cat wears a t-shirt on which is written the name of Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, who was briefly jailed in China earlier this year.

The Humboldt Box on Museum Island in Berlin’s Mitte. The building is an “interim” exhibition structure on the site of the future Humboldt Forum, which will be built on the same site and completed in 2019.

The iconic Daimler Mercedes-Benz logo speaks for itself atop this 1960-70′s era office tower in Charlottenberg, in the former heart of  west Berlin. The logo slowly spins around, as the pix below attest.

Love this. Here’s another one of those sculptures that’s bound to make somebody say “WTF?” when they see it.  We stumbled upon this near the Museum for Photography and Zoo Station in Charlottenburg, in Berlin. The artwork is a powerful, mysterious and verging-on-ominous post-modern object, hinting at some dark industrial process with its pipe-like elements. Thing of beauty within the faded, conservative glamour that is heart of posh West Berlin.

A random sample of station-name signs on the U-Bahn subway in Berlin, Germany. Pictured here: Potsdamer Platz,  Stadtmitte, Oranienburger Tor, and Mehringdamn.

The wonderful modern-contemporary architectural design of the towering GSW Hochhaus building in north end of Kreuzberg, near Mitte, in central Berlin.

Stencil street art on Museum Island in Mitte, in Berlin. What’s so striking about this stencil is that it’s duplicated and the image of a masked man — reminiscent of a terrorist –  and the “A” (for “anarchy”?) is itself mysterious and discomforting.

That the image is on a government street barrier in the cultural heart of Berlin, an area with scant graffiti or street art, is a statement, perhaps. The juxtaspostion of black stencil paint and the red and white of the barrier catch the eye as if to worn the viewer.

The presence of a hardcore German football (soccer) club supporters sticker — Karlsbande Ultras — brings another element of disruption to the image and the hint of violence.

In front of the Martin Gropius Bau museum in Berlin currently hangs a large red banner that says “Freiheit fur Ai Wei Wi” (Freedom for Ai Wei Wei”), the influential Chinese artist who was arrested and held by authorities for a few months earlier this year. A major exhibition of Wei Wei’s artwork is scheduled at the Gropius Bau this autumn.