The current structure was built from 1788 to 1791 by orders of King Frederick William II of Prussia, based on designs by the royal architect Carl Gotthard Langhans.

The Brandenburg Gate is located in the western part of the city centre within Mitte, at the junction of Unter den Linden and Ebertstraße.

One block to the north stands the Reichstag building, home to the German parliament (Bundestag), and further to the west is the Tiergarten inner-city park.

The gate also forms the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, which leads directly to the former City Palace of the Prussian monarchs (now housing the Humboldt Forum museum), and Berlin Cathedral.

[1] The central portion of the gate draws from the tradition of the Roman triumphal arch, although in style it is one of the first examples of Greek Revival architecture in Germany.

The 16 metopes along each of the long faces have scenes from Greek mythology in relief; many echo the Parthenon in showing centaurs fighting men.

[4] The side wings have plain metopes, and simple angled roofs, ending in gable pediments with a small circular relief in the tympanum.

With the construction of Dorotheenstadt around 1670 and its inclusion in Berlin's city fortifications, a first gate was built on the site, approximately at the level of today's Schadowstraße, consisting of a breach through the raised wall and a drawbridge over the dug moat.

[8] The military triumphs of his uncle Frederick the Great had made the Kingdom of Prussia a power that could not be ignored in European politics, but Berlin lacked the monuments and cultural life of Vienna, Paris or London.

His uncle's tastes had been those typical of his generation, drawing on French classicism and English Palladianism,[9] and his Brandenburg Gate in Potsdam (1770–71) was a much smaller monument, poised between Rococo and a Roman-influenced Neoclassical architecture.

[16][17] The Kaiser granted this honour to the family in gratitude to Ernst von Pfuel, who had overseen the return of the quadriga to the top of the gate.

[20] The numerous sandstone reliefs were restored and partially renovated under the artistic direction of Wilhelm Wandschneider, who remodeled one of the centaur metopes with a different motif.

[21] The gate survived World War II and was one of the damaged structures still standing in the Pariser Platz ruins in 1945 (another being the Academy of Fine Arts).

Efforts to disguise the government district of Berlin and confuse Allied bombers had included the construction of a replica Brandenburg Gate located away from the city centre.

The quadriga was completely recreated based on a plaster cast from 1942; the reconstruction was carried out by the sculptor Otto Schnitzer and the traditional foundry Hermann Noack in Friedenau.

Vehicles and pedestrians could travel freely through the gate until the day after construction began on the Berlin Wall on Barbed Wire Sunday, 13 August 1961.

In 1990, the quadriga was removed from the gate as part of renovation work carried out by the East German authorities following the fall of the wall in November 1989.

On this occasion, the Berlin office of Kardorff Ingenieure developed a new lighting concept that emphasises the gate as the most important building on the Pariser Platz.

[25] The Brandenburg Gate became the main venue for the 20th-anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall or "Festival of Freedom" on the evening of 9 November 2009.

The high point of the celebrations was when over 1000 colourfully designed foam domino tiles, each over 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) tall, were lined up along the route of the former wall through the city centre.

[27] After winning the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the Germany national football team held their victory rally in front of the gate.

[32] On 9 November 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel walked through the Brandenburg Gate with Russia's Mikhail Gorbachev and Poland's Lech Wałęsa as part of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"It is our shared responsibility to keep the memory alive and to pass it on to the coming generations as a reminder to stand up for freedom and democracy to ensure that such injustice may never happen again," Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said.

"[35][36][37] On 19 June 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke at the Gate about nuclear arms reduction and the recently revealed U.S. internet surveillance activities.

[39][40][41] In April 2017, Die Zeit noted that the gate was not illuminated in Russian colours after the 2017 Saint Petersburg Metro bombing.

The incident received criticism from the mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner, who condemned the tactics, saying they "go beyond legitimate forms of protest".

The mayor went on to say, "With these actions, this group is not only damaging the historic Brandenburg Gate, but also our free discourse about the important issues of our time and future".