The beautiful, brutal Boros bunker

In January, I read Emma's post about a German couple who had built a penthouse on top of a WW2 bunker. Intrigued, I did a little research and discovered that it was possible to visit the couple's collection of contemporary art. I booked a place on a Saturday afternoon tour of the Boros Collection. 


In a concrete monster which started life as a public bomb shelter in the war and then served as a banana warehouse before reinventing itself as the toughest club in the world in the 90s, Mr and Mrs Boros have curated an unexpectedly playful and intimate window into their personal art collection. 


We were guided round the exhibition by a charming student who explained the building's history and the stories of each piece in the collection. We were invited to dance in front of light sculptures, duck through rooms of velcro lights and cluster in a tiny room which had once provided shelter for more than a hundred frightened Berliners during an air raid. We were encouraged to look behind sculptures to see how they worked, to clamber through installations, to pause on a flight of stairs, grasp the simple wooden banister and ponder the other hands that might have passed across the same piece of wood. 


It felt as though we'd been let into a secret, right there in the middle of Berlin.