Flughafen Tegel, An Ode To Berlin’s Iconic Closed Airport From Photographers Robert Rieger And Felix Brüggemann

What intrigues you about its iconic architecture?

We spent hours walking through the deserted terminals and parking lots, observing the sun accentuating the surfaces of the worn out materials. This airport is nothing like any other airport—initially you could drive directly to your gate, without having to walk miles to reach check-in areas, or wasting time in duty free shopping malls. Today this seems very intriguing and anachronistic: nowadays, the paranoid security requirements of air travel and constant congestion of urban road traffic does not allow for such a casual and comfortable way of switching between the two, so Tegel felt increasingly dysfunctional towards the end. Still, there was something.

How did you come up with the idea to publish a photo book about Tegel?

We started this project rather playfully, just to document the place for ourselves and after a lot of visits during which we both wandered the place together, shooting side by side—we looked at the vast array of images and thought, why don’t make a small publication out of it? Eventually we found a few color slides by Felix’s grandfather, shot at Tegel in the 1970s right after it opened. We decided to include them into the project, so this is how the postcards happened. Also, we were extremely lucky to collaborate with [designer] Maximilian Mauracher for the design and [writer] Sophie Lovell for the essay.