SEE ALSO : “Trouble in Paradise. The troubled story of
the glass-walled Farnsworth House.”
‘Windows
crack every year – and the doors are too small to bring in large artworks’ …
the New National Gallery after completion in 1968. Photograph: Reinhard
Friedrich
The curse of Mies van der Rohe: Berlin’s six-year,
£120m fight to fix his dysfunctional, puddle-strewn gallery
The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a
great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art.
British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job
Oliver Wainwright
@ollywainwright
Mon 30 Aug
2021 06.00 BST
Never has
so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major
project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin’s Neue
Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above
the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the
recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the
west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of
modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the
ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”.
But as a
museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National
Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward
display spaces, presenting a curatorial nightmare for its staff. Beneath the
impractical grand hall are subterranean galleries for the permanent collection
that have the dreary feeling of a windowless office complex. It is one of the
most extreme examples of the quest for purity of form trumping the demands of
function.
“People
thought it looked like a giant petrol station when it first opened,” says David
Chipperfield, the British architect behind its six-year restoration. “But
affection grew in the decades since.” A jazzily painted BMW is now parked on
the podium, as part of the Alexander Calder reopening exhibition, neatly
completing the petrol station look. “It’s surprising how well the building
works,” adds Chipperfield diplomatically, “once people surrender to its
limitations.”
New panes
from China … the gallery and its reopening exhibition; Chipperfield was not
allowed to alter its appearance. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright/The Guardian
After a
process of forensic archival research and archaeological examination, 35,000
building components have been carefully dismantled, restored and returned to
their precise positions in a meticulous €140m (£120m) refurbishment. Not that
you’re supposed to notice. Unlike his celebrated work on Berlin’s Neues Museum,
where modern additions were inserted into the bombed-out shell of the
19th-century building, Chipperfield’s task here was to disappear. “As much Mies
as possible” was the guiding principle and, comparing the 1960s photographs
with today’s, you would be hard-pressed to spot the difference. The glass is
clearer, the matte black steelwork more all-absorbing, the granite and timber
crisper. But the real change should be felt in how smoothly the place
functions.
“A window
used to crack once or twice a year,” says head of the gallery Joachim Jäger,
standing beneath the five-metre-wide panes that enclose the main hall. “We
could never find the same glass to replace them. And the doors were far too
small to bring large artworks inside – Mies had no idea what the space would be
used for.” He lists a litany of practical problems with the vast hangar, from
puddles of water forming in the gallery owing to the condensation to the lack
of walls to display artwork. Not that any of this would have much bothered
Mies.
“It is such
a huge hall,” said the 81-year-old architect in response to criticism at the
time, “that of course it means great difficulties for the exhibiting of art. I
am fully aware of that. But it has such potential that I simply cannot take
those difficulties into account.” Such a lofty response was to be expected.
After all, this was a man who declared: “We should treat our clients as
children, not as architects.”
Still a
gloomy timewarp … the underground galleries. Photograph: Oliver Wainwright
“There was
a general suspicion that this was a building Mies had wanted to build elsewhere
for a long time,” says Chipperfield, “and he finally got to land it in Berlin.”
Mies had designed a similar project in Cuba in the 1950s, as an open-plan
office HQ for Bacardi, but it was cancelled because of the revolution. He then
recycled the same design for a museum in the Bavarian town of Schweinfurt in
1960, but the director got cold feet.
Intoxicated
by America’s supersized sense of scale, Mies was desperate to realise the
biggest indoor, column-free space imaginable, and he now had his chance in
Berlin, liberated from all constraints. It didn’t matter what it was for. “He
never had to defend his decisions,” says Chipperfield, with a hint of envy.
“The politicians said yes to whatever he wanted.”
‘I simply
cannot take those difficulties into account’ … Mies van der Rohe in
Chicago in 1960. Photograph:
Slim Aarons/Getty Images
Half a
century on, the British architect had a few more limitations. His Sisyphean
task was to fix the building’s functional flaws and improve its environmental
performance without visibly altering the structure. Normally, you can add
insulation and double glazing to a postwar building without destroying the
original vision, but Mies’s work is so stripped back, there’s nowhere to hide.
“We decided to restore and repair it as if it was not a building from the
1960s,” says Chipperfield, “but something architecturally sacred.”
Their
obsessive approach reached devotional heights. It took four years, and several
tours of Mies buildings in the US, to find the right paint to restore the
steelwork to its original matte black patina. In visible areas, it has been
repainted by hand, using brush, spray, then brush again, as preciously as if it
were The Last Supper. Similar lengths were taken to match the brown oak used in
the lower levels, tracking down veneers from a dealer in Franconia, Germany,
tinged with the particular hue that comes from the wood being infected by the
beefsteak fungus. And then there were the windows.
“You see so
many Bauhaus buildings where the window frames have been remade twice as big to
improve their thermal performance,” says Chipperfield. “We obviously couldn’t
do that here.” The solution was to replace the single 16mm panes with two
sheets of 12mm glass laminated together, made in China and each weighing 1.2
tonnes. The compromise was allowed, provided the upper gallery never shows
paintings in summer or winter when the temperatures are too extreme. The ghost
of Mies lives on.
“In
Germany, you can have a long philosophical conversation about the status of
window mullions,” says Chipperfield, referring to the vertical steel bars
between the panes of glass, which Mies made famously slender. “Whereas in
England it would be impossible. Everyone’s trying to prove you can do it twice
as quick with half the money.”
In their
exacting Germanic determination to be as faithful to the original as possible,
his Berlin team were in danger of being more Miesian than Mies himself. The big
surprise, for an architect renowned for his attention to detail, was quite how
badly the building was made. “It was like opening the bonnet of a Mercedes and
finding …” Chipperfield’s voice trails off and he gives a look of disgust.
Walls that looked like solid oak were actually cobbled together from bits of
plywood, the concrete under the granite slabs was shot to pieces, and when they
took the ceilings down, the electrical and mechanical systems were a mess. “It
was as if the surface was holding everything together.”
Venerated
as a 20th century Parthenon … the revamped building.
Similarly,
for an architect who espoused “truth to materials”, some of Mies’s surfaces
were paper thin. The suspended ceilings in the lower galleries – which looked
like a hi-tech, industrially manufactured system – were pieced together from
wood and varnished chipboard, reflecting the scarcity of materials in postwar
Berlin. “God is in the details,” Mies was fond of saying. But don’t look too
close.
Other
features have been discreetly inserted to meet today’s requirements, including
LED lighting, underfloor heating, two new ramps and a lift (concealed behind an
existing screen), while a substantial area has been excavated beneath the
podium for tech space and art storage. Two rooms have been opened up to house a
shop and a cloakroom, exposing the underside of the concrete waffle slab and
chunky columns. These were never intended to be visible. It would horrify Mies,
but it gives a nice glimpse of the structure behind the scenes.
One tragic
victim in the refurbishment were the trees. The gallery’s sunken sculpture
garden was home to some sturdy specimens, but their roots were pushing up the
granite paving. Such chaos couldn’t be tolerated. Sadly, they have been ripped
out and replaced with neat young saplings, entombed by new stone slabs.
Elsewhere,
the pressure to be faithful to 60s tastes trumped practical needs, particularly
in the lower galleries, which remain a gloomy timewarp, despite some new
lighting. “The carpet was the most emotional aspect,” says Chipperfield, who is
more used to specifying shades of polished concrete. “And we had a crisis over
the Anaglypta woodchip wallpaper.” In the end, the grey carpet was faithfully
replaced, but the textured wallpaper was deemed a step too far for the
galleries. It is now confined to the administrative areas.
“We were
afraid it would all look too 60s,” says Jäger. “But we’re much more relaxed now
that we know there’s another building coming next door. This will be the time
capsule.” He’s referring to the fact that, having spent €140m on restoring this
dysfunctional heirloom, the authorities are now constructing a brand new modern
art museum across the street, to perform all the functions the hallowed temple
cannot.
Designed by
Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron as a big brick barn, and linked to its
neighbour by a tunnel, the Museum of the 20th Century has already seen its
budget spiral from €200m to €450m. You can almost hear Mies chortling from
beyond the grave.
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