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Berlin's flaneurs were not architecture critics. They were mainly concerned with states of mind. They used the stimuli of urban spectacle to heighten awareness of contradictions, ambivalence, conflicts between repulsion and desire, the splits, loose ends and discontinuities of the nervous system. Their writings prefigure what would later be called urban semiotics, a field explored by Francoise Choay, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and other writers, most of them French.

Jean Nouvel's design for Galeries Lafayette emerges from this school of thought. Situated on Friedrichstrasse, in the former Eastern sector, the building reflects a semiotic sense of the relationship between inner and outer worlds. Before World War II, Friedrichstrasse was Berlin's Fifth Avenue, the town's smartest shopping street. After the war, that role shifted to Kurfurstendamm in the West. Nouvel's design is part of a larger plan to restore Friedrichstrasse as a corridor of luxury shopping.

Nouvel does not attempt to avoid the task of disguising profit-taking by exciting desire. Rather, he embraces the task with a frenzy that pushes the design into the realm of surreal comedy. Typically, a shopping mall will adopt a unifying architectural motif: Swiss village, high-tech or Southwestern pueblo. At Galeries Layette, the motif is optical illusion.

Like a mall, this building is focused on the interior. Its main feature is a central glass atrium formed by two cones, their bases back to back. At once transparent and reflective, the cones resemble giant 19th-century optical devices. They fracture the interior into a kaleidoscope of luxury, status and fashion. Shoppers and sales counters appear to hover in the air: a trick effect, like the images in anamorphic mirrors.

In ''Techniques of the Observer,'' Jonathan Crary argues that optical instruments were more than toys. These devices precipitated new ways of seeing. Breaking with classical ideas of perception established in the Renaissance, 19th-century scientists explored the idea that perceptions are shaped more decisively by neural apparatus than by the external reality the eyes behold. By the 1920's, this fragmented, disjointed way of seeing had worked itself into the writings of the Berlin flaneurs.

Galeries Lafayette's location in the East gives Nouvel's optical tricks an added historical dimension. For decades, West Berlin was sustained as a show window, a display of the material well-being afforded by free enterprise. One can imagine the atrium as the mental landscape of East Berliners peering over the wall into the Western showcase, visions of cashmere, blue jeans and credit cards dancing in their heads.

Norman Foster's dome for the Reichstag is a powerful civic symbol, precisely because it resembles a ghost -- an ectoplasmic cupola for a haunted building in a town of many specters. Beehive shaped, the glass dome harks back to the teens, when architects like Bruno Taut believed that the replacement of masonry by glass would help usher in a democratic utopia of transparency, freedom and social responsibility. Colored glass destroys hatred. Glass opens up a new age. So went two of the mottos inscribed at the base of the dome of the Glass Pavilion that Taut designed for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.

If only. But the glass facades of Mendelsohn's Columbus Haus did not prevent the S.S. from converting the building's top six floors into a central ''protective custody'' prison. This was in March 1933, barely a month after Hindenburg signed into law the emergency measures following the Reichstag burning. Mendelsohn's ribbon windows were easily blocked off. His large, open floor plans could be converted as easily to penal use or to retail, as in the Woolworth store that occupied the ground floor. Loading bays at the rear of Columbus Haus permitted the inconspicuous transport of prisoners.

Between 1933 and 1936, an estimated 600 Communists, Jews, homosexuals and other political undesirables were detained at what was, in effect, the first Nazi concentration camp. By then, flanerie had given way to goose steps. On the night of Nov. 9, 1938 -- Kristallnacht -- the Nazis unleashed a new symbolism for glass.

So one sees Foster's transparent dome as, in part, a monument to doomed utopias. It has already begun to function as a kind of Duomo to Berlin. Visible from many distant vantage points, it gives the city an emotional and a physical scale as well as a suitably fractured scale of time. A spiral ramp winds within the dome. Accessible to the public, the ramp conveys the idea that citizens can keep an eye on Government proceedings. Viewed from outside, the spiral suggests another meaning, perhaps more apt: history does not unfold in linear fashion. And where is the point of orientation that would let a person or a people judge whether a turn is for better or worse?

Postwar Zigzag

Given Berlin's pivotal place in the cold war, people are naturally looking to this city for signs of the contours a post-cold-war world might assume. We look for cultural indicators as well as political and economic ones, and we expect their significance to be global. The cold war was, among other things, a clash of ideas, and for half a century it held the world within its nuclear, binary embrace. By rights, the city that embodied that clash should be bubbling over with cultural ferment.