New National Gallery

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Project Name: New National Gallery
Construction year: 1968
Website: www.smb.museum
Address: Potsdamer Straße 50 , BERLIN - Germany

Architect(s) : Mies van der Rohe
Project Category: Cultural

Latitude: 52.4356
Longitude: 13.2571

New National Gallery

Starting residentially with his Farnsworth House in 1951, and institutionally with his Crown Hall for the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1956, Mies pioneered the creation of totally flexible spaces, with roofs supported only by columns outside the floor plan of the building, giving a clear span from one glass curtain wall to another. The New National Gallery in Berlin is his last and most developed form of this space – although, in keeping with the versatility of this approach to design, it is itself a close copy of an un-built 1958 design for a quite different context program: an office building in Cuba for Bacardi Rum.Along with Mies much earlier German Pavilion in Barcelona, the Neue Nationalgalerie is considered one of the foremost examples of modernist structural abstraction.

Mies was uncompromising in his pursuit of this perfection. When the infinitely flexible space between the glass curtain walls of the New National Gallery turned out to be quite unfriendly for exhibiting art, Mies unapologetic response (albeit at the age of 81) was that....It is such a huge hall 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.

Mies also refused to go along with the New National gallery s request to extend the underground part of the building to provide much-needed extra space, because the extension – though invisible because beneath the ground – would have compromised the perfect cubic proportions of the building. The building is a dramatic contrast to the other buildings of the Kulturforum from a similar period, all by the much more expressionist Hans Scharoun: his Philharmonie, Kammermusiksaal, and Staatsbibliothek.
Simon Glynn 2009

Contributed by ArchiTeam