This was the first time I've been to Ackerstrasse which is surprising as it is just one street over parallel to Kastienallee that I go up and down all the time. It is funny how one sticks to the known paths unless one consciously makes an effort not to, or unless there is a reason to go there. Like this evening when I was going to a fashionable Italian restaurant, Locando Pane to have dinner with an architect, partner in an enormously successful German practice. On Ackerstrasse there is also a most formally elegant Schinkel church so that is another reason to go there. And a supermarket that has a large tank of huge fish swimming around. If you don't mind being an executioner, and of course it is hypocrisy otherwise if you eat fish, then you buy really fresh fish just by saying ‘kill that one for me'. However I must confess, hypocritical or not, it would make me squeamish to do it myself. Getting to the restaurant first I was a bit nervous as the buildings done by Sauerbruch and Hutton are so enormously prestigious, but the instant I saw her come in I liked her enormously. First of all she is immensely, openly intelligent and friendly, not at all pretensions which I had feared. Secondly she is English, brought up in Norfolk that I hadn't known. Her husband is German and they met at the AA in London. Their buildings use a lot of colour that interests me a lot. They are so contemporary and vibrant. We chatted away about all sorts of things getting to know each other and our backgrounds. Then we had a good moan, i.e. discussion about how difficult it was to get the exact colour one wants, and how it changes when you do get it. I had said ‘well at least you don't have to mix it as you get samples ready-made'. As was quickly pointed out, yes a six-inch sample is not quite the same as twenty floors of it. Quite right. In fact my difficulties with the colour charts of paints is only a miniaturization of that, and the problems are there for both. Yes the extrapolation of a small sample into a much larger area changes it entirely, but even when you sort that out another colour put next to it, or another building built next to it can throw it off unrecognisably. On top of which the light changes and the same colour looks like four other colours, and so on. You can see how we could get really stuck into this subject. And we enjoy it. These difficulties and joys are what we are involved in. What a delightful evening. Walking back to the Milchhof, see how convenient Berlin is, one can walk home, and safely at midnight, I was gingerly picking my way, trying to avoid going into the slush, cursing my having sent back my boots to London prematurely, concentrating on not falling as it was extremely slippery, when I saw another woman coming towards me also lifting up her feet high as she went along. We spontaneously both burst into laughter at each other and the joy of it all. What a wonderful evening.
