The Pink Tube in Berlin, Germany

The quirky architecture of this place sparks the imagination. A stylized elephant with a huge pink trunk? A fat pink grub crawling through a blue box on stilts? Did a gigantic giant baby put something together out of Lego?

Or is it a stranded alien spaceship? It always felt like this building had been there forever. West-Berliners grew up with the strange sight just like with the unmovable fact that in West Berlin you would eventually hit the Wall. Most never really thought about its meaning.

The Umlauftank 2, colloquially called the "Pink Tube," is, despite its pop-art coloring, a technical functional building — the recirculation flow channel of the Hydraulic Engineering and Shipbuilding Experimental Facility at the Technical University of Berlin. The UT2 is an intersection between architecture, industrial construction, machine, and scientific instrument. On the island in the Landwehr Canal, there was already a Hydraulic Engineering and Shipbuilding experimental facility in 1903. After various renovations, the current building was constructed from 1968 to 1974, designed by the architect Ludwig Leo.

He also chose the pop pink and marine blue colors, pierced by a toxic green finger. This created a monster from the fantasy realm of the Beatles' movie “Yellow Submarine” — an urban sculpture from the seventies, which was placed under monument protection in 1995 while the architect was still alive.

A political message was also attributed to the architect: deliberately, he built the building somewhat taller than the one near Charlottenburg Gate, which the Nazis had used for representation purposes. It was the time of the Apo movement, and the building can be understood as an iconic middle finger along the axis of Albert Speer's Germania. After the TU could no longer afford maintenance in the early 2000s and the future use was unclear, the building threatened to fall into ruin. From 2014 to 2017, the UT2 was renovated with funds from the Wüstenrot Foundation and today shines in fresh candy colors.