This weekend in Berlin, I wandered into an area full of Soviet-style housing—straight lines, boxy shapes, small deep windows. At first it looked plain, even heavy, but what surprised me was the sudden feeling of familiarity. A kind of safety. It felt strange, because I never really had a fixed sense of “home.” Thinking about the houses where my family lives usually brings back memories of pain, not comfort. But here, looking at these buildings, this warmth and security, then, felt too unexpected.
I started to recall the first time I saw this kind of building style: on cold days, looking out from one of those small, deep windows, with the heater making the whole room toasty, in sharp contrast to the fierce cold outside. Those were the days I lived as a child in northern China, in Inner Mongolia, before I turned seven. In my memory, it was almost winter the whole year. My first sense of “home” began there, in that heated room—an insulated space apart from the outside world, different from the grey bricks stuck to the building’s façade. That was the early beginning of “me”.

In Berlin, the same style of buildings carries a different feeling. The walls are freshly painted in young, lighthearted colors—pink and green, pink and blue, or just pink. The people living inside now have completely different lives, economic status, beliefs, and cultures from those in the buildings of my childhood. And yet, that zone of buildings still brought me an irresistible connectness and sense of grounding. Something about the it pulled me back. I observed how the space was constructed: boxy buildings on four sides, enclosing an empty grassy square in the middle. That layout, I think, is what created the *zone* that pulled me back to memory. I wish I could explore more. I am curious about what lies behind this layout of buildings, how it creates a physical space that can hold the culture of its residents. What are the stories behind those windows? What kinds of lives are unfolding today inside this cultural architecture and space?