Every design for Jena

Jena fills a wide stretch of the Saale valley in the east of Thuringia, hemmed in by limestone and sandstone slopes, with Weimar and Erfurt just to the west.

There is a bright, inventive feel to the city, and it is earned. For most of the twentieth century Jena was a world centre of the optical industry, built around Carl Zeiss and Schott, and it still makes precision instruments today alongside software and biotechnology. The JenTower and the other high-rise buildings in the centre, rare for a city this size, grew out of the old Zeiss works. The university, founded in the sixteenth century and named after Friedrich Schiller, gives the streets a young crowd, while Schillers Gartenhaus and the Romantikerhaus recall the years when Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, Fichte and Schopenhauer made this small town a centre of German thought. Walk out of town and the hillsides are known across Germany for their wild orchids.

The Hanfried, the Johannistor and the Pulverturm hold the old town together. Put them on a shirt and you carry Jena's mix of old learning and new light.