Panorama Bar

The control room that opened first

In October 2004, months before the old turbine hall of the Friedrichshain Fernheizwerk opened as the main floor of Berghain, the building's former control room was already up and running as Panorama Bar. The venue inherited the name and the pulse of the Ostgut Panoramabar, which closed in 2003 when the Mühlenstraße railway depot was demolished. There, house music had brought together the gay scene, the rave community, and a mixed crowd that could not find that intersection in other Berlin techno basements. Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele moved that idea to the first floor of the new complex: a brighter, less cavernous dance floor, designed for long sets rather than the dry punch of the ground floor.

Large windows, blinds, and a second level

The name is not just for show. The space occupies the control room of the 1953-54 thermal power station, with large windows that, when the blinds are raised towards the end of the Klubnacht, let the sunrise in over the Ostbahnhof tracks. Studio Karhard preserved the original technical installations and integrated them into the design. In 2009, a lounge was added on a second floor, featuring a major glass work by Marc Brandenburg, and the restrooms were rebuilt. In 2010, a relaunch of lighting, acoustics, and the bar arrived, along with new work by Wolfgang Tillmans, present in the club since the opening—then accompanied by the mural by Piotr Nathan. The perimeter bar and an elevated metal DJ booth organize the dance floor without theatricalizing it.

Resistance House

If techno rules downstairs, the programming upstairs has been sustained by house, deep house, and tech house, with sets measured in hours. The Ostgut Ton label, closed in 2021, dedicated a series of mixes to this floor—from Cassy to Tama Sumo, Steffi, Nick Höppner, or Ryan Elliott—that attempted to capture the room's temperature on record. Today, Panorama Bar opens on Fridays with its own parties, often from 22:00, and on Saturday at 23:59 it joins the complex's Klubnacht, which usually lasts until Monday morning. The door policy is the same: selective and opaque, with entry from 18 years old and a strict no-photography policy.

A system cut for a difficult space

Glass, concrete, and tiles make the room an acoustic challenge. After a Meyer Sound system installed around 2010, in 2017 a custom system by Studt Akustik was unveiled: a four-point line array and six high-power subwoofers, oriented towards the dance floor and not the reflective surfaces. It is not the Funktion-One from the floor below; it is another tool, designed for a lower and brighter venue, where house music needs impact without causing fatigue in the early hours.