Research Essay

New National Gallery, Berlin 1968, Mies van der Rohe

Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach 2006, David Chipperfield

JosĂŠ Pedro Paiva Guerra . 171752 . Politecnico di Torino

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INDEX!

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Introduction

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Description New National Gallery

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Museum of Modern Literature

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The Project and the Context New National Gallery Museum of Modern Literature

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Conclusive Comparison

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Bibliography

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INTRODUCTION!

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As almost in every case, the notion of creativity and new ideas is always connected with a series of examples already developed, serving as rout to innovation and evolution, regardless the field of work.

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New National Gallery, Berlin, 1968

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Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach, 2006

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In the field of Architecture this notion can be quite powerful to a better interpretation of what it is produced.

Every architect as an influence in all the work he develops, being other architects or other sources of inspiration. So, to have a better knowledge of what is really new and what can be connected to past influences, with the purpose of fulfilling this course, I’ve decided to compare two projects with similar functions and forms – the New National Gallery in Berlin, of Mies van der Rohe (1968) and the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, of David Chipperfield (2006).

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Bird’s eye view of the New National Gallery and Kulturforum

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Bird’s eye view of the Museum of Modern Literature and the scenic park

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DESCRIPTION!

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New National National Gallery Gallery New “Neue Nationalgalerie�, placed on the Kulturforum, is a museum for modern art, with its main focus on the early 20th century, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968.

The architecture of the museum is a powerful and expressive object in itself. Nearly all of the museum's collections are located within in a stone podium, solid to protect the art from damaging daylight, partially in the ground of the sloping site, with windows only on one side facing a walled sculpture garden. A minimalist steel and glass pavilion, located on the paved roof plaza above the podium, serves as the entrance lobby and the special exhibit gallery.

The pavilion, while a small part of the museum, is the primary architectural expression. Its structure consists of a large steel roof deck supported by eight exterior columns, creating an effect of a shelter with a single floating plane. Large glass sheets that define the interior space are set far back from the roof edges, framed by delicate steel mullions. The glass walls and the elimination of all interior columns emphasizes the idea of free space as a place for artists to present their work, unencumbered by the necessity of a shelter to protect visitors and contents from the elements.

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External view of the entrance lobby from higher ground.

Interior of the entrance lobby.

Interior of the exhibit gallery.

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DESCRIPTION!

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New National Gallery View of the superior entrance and its plaza.

Natural light transmitted through these walls reflects off the dark, highly polished floor, emphasizing the extension of space beyond the boundaries of the interior, a symbolic removal of solid walls as barriers. The podium roof plaza is itself another open air gallery for public sculpture, extending the exhibit space of the pavilion to the outside.

Garden of the gallery below its entrance.

The unusual natural illumination, coming from around and below the viewer rather than above, and the continuous suggestion of motion in the ceiling, combine to shock the viewer out of his or her usual way of seeing, perhaps preparing the audience to bring a fresh eye to the art housed below.

Yet, at the same time, the simplicity and rigorously pure geometry of the space's rectangular forms makes the design seem tranquil, rather than obtrusive. This careful balance of free-flowing space and a stable arrangement of architectural components are typical of Mies van der Rohe's mature style.

Gallery below and its garden, with entrance above, at night.

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DESCRIPTION!

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Museum of Modern Literature !

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The museum is located in Marbach’s scenic park, on the top of a rock plateau overlooking the valley of the Neckar River. As birthplace of the dramatist Friedrich Schiller, the town’s park already held the National Schiller Museum, built in 1903, and the Archive for German Literature, built in the 70’s.

Displaying artifacts from the extensive 20th century collection from the Archive for German Literature, notably the original manuscripts of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and Alfred Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, the museum also provides panoramic views across and over the distant landscape.

View of the museum and part of Marbach’s scenic park.

The museum and the National Schiller Museum on the right.

Embedded in the topography, the museum reveals different elevations depending on the viewpoint. By utilizing the steep slope of the site, terraces allow for the creation of very different characters: an intimate, shaded entrance on the brow of the hill facing the National Schiller Museum with its forecourt and park, and a grander, more open series of tiered spaces facing the valley below. A pavilion-like volume is located on the highest terrace, providing the entrance to the museum.

Main entrance from the higher part of the building.

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DESCRIPTION!

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Museum of Modern Literature !

Corridor between the concrete columns and the glass wall.

The interiors of the museum reveal themselves as one descends down through the loggia, foyer and staircase spaces, preparing the visitor for the dark timberpaneled exhibition galleries, illuminated only by artificial light due to fragility and sensitivity of the works on display. At the same time, each of these environmentally controlled spaces borders onto a naturally lit gallery, balancing views inward to the composed, internalized world of texts and manuscripts with the green and scenic valley on the other side of the glass.

A clearly defined material concept using solid materials (fair- faced concrete, sandblasted reconstituted stone with limestone aggregate, limestone, wood, felt and glass) gives the calm, rational architectural language a sensual physical presence.

Interior corridor and its natural light of the superior floor.

The observer is gradually being prepared by the daylight atmosphere to the dark atmosphere of artificial light, which require the fragile exhibits. The spatial sequence of Ipe wood-lined rooms exhibition is complemented by glazed Tageslichtloggien, which make up the exhibit introverted world in relation to the outer space.

Interior of the museum and its exhibition.

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THE!PROJECT!AND!THE!CONTEXT!

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New National Gallery Plant of the first floor (Entrance lobby)

The floor plans are organized on the basis of a modular grid of 3.60 x 3.60 m, and the basement, four meters high, is built of reinforced concrete with a wheelbase of 7.20 m pillars. While the above ground we have seen to be represented by a square room of 50.40 x 50.40 m, 8.40 m high, glass on four sides and completely free inside, except for two vertical pipes that carry the technical equipment to the ceiling, where the same are then distributed horizontally, aggregated into a square mesh metal ceiling. Panels hanged serve the painting exhibitions, freely placed to form the scores of space without interrupting.

The coverage of steel, 64.80 x 64.80 m, is an orthotropic plate, unique in the history of the buildings, consisting of a structural grid of trusses with 3.60 x 3.60 m, 1.80 m high, continuously welded to an upper floor collapsed, reinforced with steel ribs to prevent distortion.

The supports consist of eight tapered cruciform pillars, also of steel, placed two on each side to the outer edge of the cover, with support point, and very far from the edges that come out to eira cantilevered 18 meters. It is, overall, a structural idea that represents the culmination of research within the structures of Mies in great light to the creation of compartmentalized spaces.

Plant of the underground floor (gallery and garden)

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The treatment of space is a dynamic and continuous entity, which is developed by subsequent mediation from "fully open" of the road and its surroundings. From here you climb to the elevated terrace and paved with large square plates of granite, so just by establishing a relationship of detachment, while seamlessly with their surroundings: this is the "classical view" and even more neo-classical, Mies, similar to the operation of the formation of open space in front of the Seagram Building. Before entering the large hall, we expect a further step mediated: the space, always external, but covered by the seven and twenty feet of roof overhang to the perimeter of the plate glass windows.

These reflect two sides of the distant depths of the city, opposite the entrance of the Library building by Scharoun, the fourth church of St. Matthew and the Philharmonie.

West-East Section

East Elevation

North-South Section

At the same time, you can see the interior: the dynamic relationship between transparencies and reflections are very intense and continuous, reverse, once inside. Two large stairs leading to the basement, where the discourse seems at first to be completed in the closed space of the atrium, but then resumes again immediately, and there is the sprint of the large glass enclosed sculpture garden on the top retaining wall.

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West-East Section

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New National Gallery Design model to the interior of the exhibition gallery

Detail of the ceiling and its support (columns)

Details of the hanged panels

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There is thus a continuous flow of spaces, each time, however, characterized by a precise specificity: condensations and expansions, constrictions and openings perspective, differences in finish materials, lighting features, are all treated with respect consequentiality to functions from time to time present.

This is the same generalization of the necessary relationship between architectural structure and composition, in passing, among other things, the historical dichotomy between disciplinary engineering and architecture.

The inflexibility of the design methodology of Mies van der Rohe's uncompromising, leaving no spaces uncontrolled stress of emotion. The component is not rational, or “a-rational�, or sometimes irrational impression on him that every work of art seems to be confined to his original design at the moment of intuition, for it would then be poured into the refined poetic tension that pervades its architecture. Also on this floor we find ourselves once again faced with the same organic integration of the works found in the concrete, and this time between two components, the rational and the emotional, in other dignitaries are also present together and intersecting, but often broken up when not in conflicting relationship.

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THE!PROJECT!AND!THE!CONTEXT!

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Museum of Modern Literature

Plant of the first floor (Entrance lobby)

Plant of the ground floor (gallery and garden)

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David Chipperfield’s haunting Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, near Stuttgart, southern Germany, is extraordinary for its reduction of architecture to the barest essentials. But what is more interesting, perhaps, is that Chipperfield won the commission for the museum at all. That in a country still plagued by memories of Nazi monumental classicism and its ongoing dilemma of how to achieve a suitable expression of monumentality in its architecture, an architect, a foreign one at that, would dare propose a neo-classical colonnaded structure for a building of such national importance.

Challenging an unwritten rule that post-war German buildings should never have columns, Chipperfield nevertheless entered the competition with his spare, rectilinear temple. “We felt we were bringing back a sort of classicism that hadn’t been seen in this part of Germany since the war,” he says. “And the period was far enough away that the discussion could be interesting. Germans are willing to analyze what things mean. It’s a great climate to work in. I wanted to reduce the architecture to its most simplified, almost primitive form”.

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THE!PROJECT!AND!THE!CONTEXT!

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Museum of Modern Literature Given the parkland site, Chipperfield came up with a scheme for a temple on a podium, where the base, containing six exhibition galleries, would be partially embedded into the side of the hill, with entry provided via a glass and concrete colonnaded pavilion on top.!

Visitors enter the museum through this upper level lantern, reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe’s entrance to the Berlin Art Gallery, with its crystalline glass and steel pavilion atop a base. Marbach is sparer, the pavilion marked by a screen of skinny concrete columns, without capitals or bases, wrapped around its four regular, symmetrical sides. !

West Elevation

It sits ever so lightly, transparent-like, over the exhibition galleries where the columns more frequently turn into mullions for glass walls or pilasters set against solid panels. Roof terraces, podium walls and parapets are formed of stringently linear planks of sandblasted precast concrete with a limestone aggregate.!

West-East Section

Chipperfield pared the columns until they became almost impossibly thin, but still capable of being pre-cast in concrete. They also played a subtle game of sorts with the march of the columns: while on the upper lantern all elevations share a single column where that turns a corner, on the lower level the colonnades each stop a column-width short of the sharp edge of the corner itself.

Columns are also omitted where they signal entrances.!

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North Elevation

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THE!PROJECT!AND!THE!CONTEXT!

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Museum of Modern Literature The greater challenge though, where the books and manuscripts were required to be housed in dimly lit (50 lux) spaces to protect them from daylight. In order not to create a gloomy or claustrophobic environment, Chipperfield tried to expand the sense of enclosure with extra layers of outdoor terraces that take advantage of the views across the landscape.

Interior Details

Wooden model of the Museum

Entering the museum, visitors find themselves in a large hall where Ipe, a dark Brazilian wood, clads much of the walls. Daylight bathes the limestone floors and insitu concrete walls and soffits in an ethereal glow.

Museum goers then work their way down a series of grand stairs in a carefully choreographed journey of axial turns and views to prepare them for the dimly lit lower ground galleries, subtly reducing light levels as they descend. Once on the lowest level, a suite of exhibition spaces is arranged around three anterooms. Rigidly contained in plan, space is permitted to shift beneath the external terraces that rise and fall.

Since the main exhibition galleries, for permanent collections and temporary exhibitions, were required to have close-control environments, and as such starved of natural light, Chipperfield designed these windowless rooms to adjoin a space that is either a glazed loggia or illuminated by skylights to diminish the sense of having descended into a tomb.

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CONCLUSIVE!COMPARISON!

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As it was stated initially, the whole concept of something new comes from an early assimilation, from the most varied information that a person constructs as visual memory and intellectual absorption. What is built now will influence attitudes and expressions of future constructions, as well as it was created from ancestral roots, stressing the idea of an "evolution" and not a "revolution", as something that we always know and/or experience.

In this sense, Chipperfield’s project envisions a somewhat similar idea to the key project of Mies van der Rohe – the design of an upper floor as an entrance to a space that wants more closed to the outside, facing himself. Just as the New National Gallery, the Museum of Modern Literature entrance lobby features a visibly exposed space to the surrounding environment, with a sort of form (coverage structure, pillars and a very straight line and proportional design – the use of the square) and function (cultural exhibitions - art and literature) at least comparable.

The architectural expression of these two projects approaches them for its simplicity and its responses to the challenge. Solving the problem of illumination, to which all museums should give utmost importance, was a decisive to build a partial sustainable architecture in terms of illumination issues, since both projects take advantage of natural and controlled light.

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CONCLUSIVE!COMPARISON!

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The simplicity of the materials chosen and the interior spaces created can be another point in common between the two museums, which have an identical functional purpose, in part conveys the need and demand for space of this kind, regardless of their place of deployment. Within this idea of simplicity, there is the purpose of using symmetry as key weapon in the architecture, seen on the upper floors so that approaches so much the two conceived shapes here explored.

The aforementioned relationship between architectural structure and composition is an essential basis for the interpretation of the two buildings. By contrast – one with a minimal and punctual structure (New National Gallery) and the other with a structure variously repeated that in a way deceives the importance of its necessity (Museum of Modern Literature) – both hard to take care that the structure is important.

The strength of knowledge that became the modern architecture gives us a great responsibility to continue this unstoppable form of expression and creation that shapes the world, leaving for that reason its innovative ideas that are hugely common in the nowadays architectural conception.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY!

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New National Gallery

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Museum of Modern Literature

. Cohen, Jean-Louis . “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe / JeanLouis Cohen” . Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhauser, 2007

. Chipperfield, David . “David Chipperfield / Giovanni Leoni” . Milano: Motta, 2007

. Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig . “Mies van der Rohe / Giovanni Leoni” . Milano: Motta, 2008

. http://www.davidchipperfield.co.uk/

. Carter, Peter . “Mies van der Rohe at work / Peter Carter” . London: Phaidon, 2006 . Calzà, Gianni . “Mies van der Rihe, la Galleria Nazionale di Berlino / Gianni Calzà” . Firenze: Alinea, 1988

. http://www.openbuildings.com/ . http://archrecord.construction.com/ . http://www.dezeen.com/

. http://www.openbuildings.com/ . http://www.smb.museum/ . http://www.archdaily.com/ . http://www.greatbuildings.com/ . http://www.miessociety.org/

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