The buildings around Gerhard’s home, and in fact the apartment/performance space/gallery where Gerhard and Kunsu live, are the artistic fragments left from a demolished industrial center, a series of overwhelmingly boring buildings that have been reduced to beautiful fragments and tentative skeletons. The entire area has been turned into a park, but a strange one: 
a white tower rises out of a grassy lawn, but it was really just the Treppenhaus (staircase) of one of those boring buildings that are so long gone; the metal ripped from the sides, twisted cables falling away, and it has lights that go on at night that suggest the typical modern German staircase that everyone in the country has gone up and down so often: stark but workable, sensible, well-lit, here isolated from its former surroundings.
And there are glass shells that were the skylights of a former building: the building has been removed all around and, as with all these buildings, the remains painted white – except the glass, which becomes weirdly ethereal, sculptural. 
And the steel wings across the path from them, which were once structural, deep bones holding up a working ceiling: now that they are alone, and painted white of course, they fly against the sky.
The ‘waves’ (Wellen) – the up and down curves of concrete with grass on them – are the only part that was actually created new; and they are indeed beautiful and peculiar. People sit on them in little groups, smoking and chatting; Gerhard and Kunsu once saw a couple making love in the bottom of one of the waves, under the illusion that no one could see them. The tree didn’t work, unfortunately – as you can see in the picture, it died – because of something that a good gardener could have guessed: since its water table is raised two feet above its surroundings, the water doesn’t rise that far and the tree died. But it has formed its own stark sculpture, which fits remarkably well with the industrial fragments all around.
There is at least one 'real' sculpture – one that, as it happens, emphasizes engineering ability above all: this hugely heavy, rusted thing is cantilevered, and you know that despite its weight it will never fall.
In the middle, a beautiful but architecturally complicated Jewish museum (impossible to photograph, it would just look like slabs of concrete – they are arranged in a fan, and it would take a helicopter to really capture the shape of them). And then at the end, the white structure that has Gerhard and Kunsu’s pleasant working apartment upstairs, full of books, two offices, the large bathroom, the smaller bedroom; light and full of a quality of getting things done. Downstairs are concrete floors and a good German grand piano (I kept thinking: how uncomfortable, I would want some sort of rugs; then I realized how good the room must be for all kinds of performance and recording – all hard surfaces, no dampening).
The other half of the building is gallery plus office; parts of the building on both sides straggle, fragments from the old industries, now made surprisingly artistic, almost like a weirdly beautiful Japanese garden out of chunks of steel and concrete.
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