Berghain / Panorama Bar

The building was the Friedrichshain Combined Heat and Power Plant, finished in 1953 and abandoned in the 1980s. Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele came to it from Ostgut, the club they ran in a railway repair depot from 1998 until January 2003, which grew in turn out of parties that began in 1992. Panorama Bar opened upstairs in October 2004, a couple of months before the main room. House people should start there. The upper room has always been the house floor, and in 2017 it got a four-point line array and six subwoofers from Studt Akustik. Berghain itself runs a Funktion-One system, first installed in 2005 and replaced in 2023. Capacity is about 1,500. The club rented from Vattenfall at first and has owned the building since 2011. In 2016 a German court designated it a cultural institution, which lowers the tax it pays. That ruling did more for the argument that clubs are culture than any number of panel discussions.