With an endless array of architectural schools and institutions, the architecture students of Cornell’s NYC Program have the opportunity to stumble upon a number of lectures any weeknight in New York City. The highlight of this week was no doubt the February 2nd David Chipperfield lecture at Columbia University, hosted as part of the Paul S. Byard Memorial Lecture Series.
Chipperfield, a London-based architect with additional offices in Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai, is known for a philosophical approach to architecture that transcends the aesthetics of style. For the lecture, he focused on a project that exemplified this practice—the rebuilding of the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island.
Museum Island, known as the ‘Acropolis of Berlin’ for its array of landmark museums (including the Atles Museum, the National Gallery, the Bode Museum, and the Pergamon Museum) endured extensive bombing during World War II. By 1997, the Neues Museum had become sorrowfully diminished, scarred by both war and subsequent decades of neglect.
Dealing with damage and ruination is common in Germany, with its broad history of war and political unrest in the twentieth century. Chipperfied remarked that “Every city has history but Berlin has too much.” Even so, the Neues Museum had the unique condition of having been a ruin for as long as it had been a building, a phenomena that resulted in the museum “having matured as a ruin.” For Chipperfield, the museum could not be delineated in terms of new and old; bombing and wear over time created a gradient of epochs in the building’s history.
Chipperfield approached the project by attempting to re-establish the form and figure of the original building, describing preservation as a stimulus for a better quality of architecture. Before design could begin, the architect found it necessary to set forth a philosophical essay of intentions that addressed the project’s diversity of expectations (the city government saw it as a restoration effort; the museum staff saw the project as an opportunity to meet growing programmatic needs).
This doctrine included a desire to retain all original material. Rather than inject a completely modern shell into the building’s ruins, Chipperfield made a diligent effort to recover, repair, and highlight the building’s remaining architectural fragments. Chipperfield therefore desired a material as neutral as possible to frame the building fragments, selecting white concrete as the default material for repairing damaged surfaces. Where materials were impossible to recover, he instead made plays on the original geometries, such as replacing the bombed shell of a domed room with a brick dome on a square base, an unusual geometry speaking to a contemporary outlook on architecture.
Over the twelve year process, there was a constant struggle to address the concerns of the public, the government, and the existing staff of Museum Island. Nonetheless, Chipperfield spoke of the unusual degree of public interaction endearingly, noting how public discussions only helped to strengthen the philosophical roots of the project. Chipperfield concluded, “If someone asks you a difficult question, you fend it off. But you go home and it keeps you up at night, and you work it out.”