I should have been here in 1948-9. This is Tempelhof Airport, and that was the Berlin Airlift: planes arriving and departing every few seconds, laden with supplies to the besieged Berliners. Such a flow of planes made an almost solid aerial connection: the German word for that extraordinary event, Luftbrücke, or Air Bridge, describes it pretty exactly. It was a road across the sky. I do not know if Tempelhof's architect was there to see it. There is very little I know about him.

Or I should have been here in 1937, when the place was brand new and someone was carving the triumphal German eagles at the ends of the approach colonnades. Half-close your eyes as you walk up to the entrance facade of Tempelhof - all stripped-classical details hewn in limestone - and you can imagine the Nazi banners stretched across the front. There is a little pediment at the top which looks as if it should have supported a swastika, though I do not know if it ever did. It is idle curiosity, but you cannot help wondering: just as you do when you go to the Biennale gardens in Venice and encounter the more conventionally classical German Pavilion of the same period, and see the screw-holes in the centre of the pediment where something or other has been removed.