The Kollhoff Tower is the tallest building on Potsdamer Platz, and it looks like it arrived from the wrong decade. Architect Hans Kollhoff modelled it on American skyscrapers from the 1920s, giving this 1999 building a terracotta-brick facade and a stepped silhouette that would feel at home in 1930s Manhattan. The result is deliberately anachronistic: a building that nods to a Berlin that no longer exists, planted on ground where the Wall once ran.

Together with the Bahntower to the north and Renzo Piano's Forum Tower to the south, it forms a high-rise ensemble at the centre of the city. The trio frames Potsdamer Platz like a gateway. The fastest passenger elevator in Europe carries visitors to the Panoramapunkt observation deck at the top in around twenty seconds.

VoiceMap's Berlin Wall tours use the Kollhoff Tower's location to anchor the story of how a Cold War no-man's land became one of Europe's most ambitious architectural projects, tracing the Wall's former course across the very ground the building now stands on.