Germany's capital is on such a huge scale that pared-back, chic structures, which would be signature buildings in other cities, can get buried in among the rest, writes Emma Cullinan

Across the wide street is a lengthy row of 1950s, 60s and 70s office blocks with no redeeming features. I open a guide to Berlin and look for an old quarter. I surprise myself. I like contemporary architecture, hate pastiche and yet after a few hours in Berlin I need horizontals, human scale and hand-crafted materials.

The budget airlines land in Schonefeld to the south east of Berlin and the train or taxi in from here gives plenty of opportunity to see that there are no houses near the inner city, it's all apartment blocks. As you get closer into town these become offices and shops. The scale is the same. The buildings are all practically the same width and height. The roads are very wide and so, as a mere human, you feel small. Is this why Berliners have a reputation for being flamboyant - they have to make a noise to be noticed?

On the train in from the airport one local smashed a bottle through the window and a recently landed young-American threatened to beat up a pensioner who brushed his knee against the American's suitcase and, for good measure, the youth stood up and asked if anyone else in the carriage would like to take him on. No-one seemed keen. .

Berlin has always been up with the architectural movements. It had its Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Historic, Modern and post-Modern phases. One of its most famous architects is Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a classicist, who was in his element when classicism became part of Berlin architecture from end of 1700s. The city was even dubbed Athens on the Spree (its river). The Brandenburg Gate by Carl Gottherd Langhans certainly took inspiration from ancient Greece.

With the growth of industry, large residential areas for workers were created in the latter half of the 1800s, hence the reams of stark accommodation. After the first world war Berlin embraced Modernism and then came the Second World war in which Berlin lost around a third of its buildings - with nearer 50 per cent at its centre.

The division of Berlin saw the shifting of town centres, and bare tracts of land around the wall. Reunified in 1990, the city is now trying to find its centre and identity. First impressions are of a city full of large buildings that look similar.

You know that there are architectural gems here - Renzo Piano's been in town, as has Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Alvar Aalto, Santiago Calatrava, Arne Jacobsen, Le Corbusier, Daniel Libeskind, Erich Mendelsohn, Aldo Rossi, Hans Scharoun, Michael Wilford et al. Armed with such a list you expect to find a city glistening with stupendous buildings. Fair play to Berlin - if you're going to build in substantial parts of the city then why not employ the who's who of international architecture.

The buildings have been well documented in the architectural press and beyond, and they're mainly excellent, but slotted into Berlin, they seem to disappear. This is a real lesson in scale and conforming to type. With everything at the same size, and made from the same materials, those ever so chic, pared-back structures that become signature buildings in other cities magically disappear in Berlin.

Planning has something to do with it because new buildings have to be, to a certain extent, in keeping. Walk beneath the Brandenburg Gate and to your left is a building that demands a double take. It looks so ordinary and then the break from the norm becomes apparent - in its sloping windows on the first and fourth floors. It's a Frank Gehry, circa 1999, and to the front it's in keeping - the planning authorities wanted a certain wall-to-window ratio - but up top you can see the swelling element sticking up, the architect's deconstructivist streak bursting skywards. In the Peek and Cloppenburg department store on Kurfurstemdamn, by Gottfried and Peter Bohm, there's also a sloping glass thing going on to show how the building differs from many of its neighbours.

Once you start looking around the city -the best way is to hire a bike - the architectural gems begin to show themselves (one example of design excellence being the generous bike lanes).

Gehry's alien roof structure, bursting from a rectangular building, has repeats around the city, where the clever architects have got over the problem of sleek buildings becoming invisible, and the lack of vertical interest, by dispensing with flush facades.

The British Embassy building, by Michael Wilford, who continued the practice of James Stirling after he died in 1992, comprises an innocuous sandstone facade with a huge cavern in the centre in which a round purple room and a light blue trapezoid sit - breaking up the exterior.

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish museum, on a less tight site than many, zigzags its way out of the conformist box. The guides love the fact that the design of the building comes with so many stories to relate. The architect has taken chunks out of parts of the building and replanted them elsewhere on the site - and left empty voids in the main structure - to exhibit the alienation of the Jews. "This is how the architect describes his building," one guide told her assembled group. "But sometimes the story changes because the architect says that there is not just one version of a story." Good old Libeskind.

Another building on its own, with some space to play with, is Hans Scharoun's Philharmonie, built in 1963. The yellow wave-like exterior marks it out and the interior is either the work of a master of space - if it was pre-planned - or the result of organically working the space from the inside out and seeing where everything fits in. Either way its a joy - with concrete columns and staircases coming at you at random. The only reason you don't get lost is that you can nearly always see across the whole space.

Sticking with the sunny palette is the GSW office building by Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbruch, covered in orangey pinkish sun-screening blinds that change colour depending on your viewpoint. This, along with the building's gentle convex curve, gives it a grace and delight not shared by its neighbours.

Richard Rogers has used curves and indents well in his Potsdamer Platz buildings, again breaking up the Berlin monoform. The rest of Potsdamer Platz, including buildings by Renzo Piano and the Sony Center by Helmut Jahn, is quite scary. The buildings are prime examples of their type, but grouped together they're overwhelming. Think upmarket IFSC - when you're among stupendous edifices in concrete, glass and steel you start hankering after a small coffee shop in a wooden shack. The Potsdamer Platz buildings photograph well, but they're often seen from on high - the roof of the Sony Center is stunning, a hi-tech version of a Japanese paper parasol - but you don't get this aspect at ground level.

One Berlin building that combines old and new is the Reichstag. The original part was completed in 1890 to a design by Paul Wallot. A fire in 1933 destroyed the interior and then at the end of World War II the building was damaged again. When it was decided that this would house the German government after reunification, an architectural competition to revamp the building was won by Norman Foster. He put a glass dome on top (not in the form it took in the competition scheme) with two twisting ramps that people can ascend (including those in wheelchairs).

There's a perma-queue to get into this building. Is it the link between old and new that is so attractive, or the fact that you can easily climb the architectural wonder and see the city of Berlin below?

How we love a bird's eye view - Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York has the Empire State, London has the big wheel and Dublin has the - oh - Spire: bit of a missed opportunity for interaction there.

Twisting glass seems to have been catching in Berlin. Jean Nouvel's Galeries Lafayette store has a glass cocoon shooting up its centre (nice coffee to be had at the base) and IM Pei has stuck a swirling glass staircase onto the Deutches Historiches Museum.

There is a part of town with old buildings, after all, on the Unter den Linden. Here classicist Schinkel is much in evidence, not least his concert hall in the Gendarmenmarkt square - which is completed with other classical structures.

Nearby the cluster of classical buildings on Museum Island is so impressive that it has been given Unesco World Heritage site status. But again, the structures are all huge.

It's no wonder Berlin is full of characters.