THE FUSE

Those who entered Berlin in the West after 1979 passed a building that felt like an alien entity wedged between a stark, mid-1930s exhibition centre, a motorway, and a turn-of-the-century neighbourhood. The unusual structure was squat and elongated, with spiral staircases protruding like insect legs from its exoskeleton; it seemed frozen in a mechanical forward motion. Still there to this day, the ICC is one of Berlin’s great sleeping giants: a building once constructed with a single function in mind, like decommissioned airports or an animal testing facility; and it is now waiting for its new purpose.