This much is clear: Hardly any other capital in the world has an airport located practically in the middle of the city. It takes all of 15 minutes to get by bicycle from Berlin's Tempelhof Airport to the intersection of two of the city's most important thoroughfares, Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, and 20 minutes to the Brandenburg Gate and the monumental Reichstag, which houses the German parliament.
From the roof of the airport's enormous, semi-circular complex, 1,230 meters (4,035 feet) from one end to the other, Berlin's sea of buildings seems as if it were set in the middle of a vast prairie, the flatlands that postwar West Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, famously dubbed the beginnings of the Russian steppes. Other contemporaries had a considerably more romantic take on this unique sense of vastness. "The airport in Tempelhof unites the characteristics of an inland sea with the yearning for faraway places," a delighted observer once said. Axel Schultes, the architect who designed the new Chancellery in the city's Mitte district, even goes so far as to describe Tempelhof as an "icon of an airport."
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