The Factory and the Ruin
New Berlin Museum for 20th Century Art
The Factory and the Ruin expand upon the notion of designing the museum of the 20th Century art at the core of the former West Berlin, Potsdamer Platz. Such occasion represented the opportunity to reflect on the implications of designing in the city of Berlin, which stays at odd with its own history and scenarios even after that the rubbles of the war have been cleared out and new images of the city could capture the sight again.
The Cultural Forum is the site which is invested by the competition brief formulated in order to give an architectonic shape to the intentions of several art collectors whose aim is to reunite and to exhibit their treasures under the same roof, thus the extension of the Neue National Gallerie is on the agenda of the city governors.
The Cultural Forum is the site which is invested by the competition brief formulated in order to give an architectonic shape to the intentions of several art collectors whose aim is to reunite and to exhibit their treasures under the same roof, thus the extension of the Neue National Gallerie is on the agenda of the city governors.
In the supportive research for the design, the act of demolition of the ruins of the West Berlin is unveiled for its intrinsic significance of detaching Berlin from its past so to allow modernism to inform the new architectural discussion.
In order to make sense of this burden that determined an unglued urban scenario hold between the shop/leisure and the cultural activities of the museum and music clusters, as in an operation of modern archaeology, the historical layer of the Prussian neighbourhoods is un-earthed and imposed on the site by attaching it to the Church. This operation has generated the precedent for the museum of the 20th Century Art. To that followed the definition of the volume of the museum by mimicking the size of the Neue National Galerie: a twist between the Miesian built void and the new museum’s built mass.
In order to make sense of this burden that determined an unglued urban scenario hold between the shop/leisure and the cultural activities of the museum and music clusters, as in an operation of modern archaeology, the historical layer of the Prussian neighbourhoods is un-earthed and imposed on the site by attaching it to the Church. This operation has generated the precedent for the museum of the 20th Century Art. To that followed the definition of the volume of the museum by mimicking the size of the Neue National Galerie: a twist between the Miesian built void and the new museum’s built mass.
The Museum, as a type ascending in the urban realm of any major city, has been interpreted as a complex machine which processes the continuous changing language of art. For that, the factory with the shed roof offering a masterplan of solutions for exhibitions, but also the most representative ‘as found’ environment of the late 20th Century Artspace, meets up with the ruins of the Cultural Forum, which traces become space for art and culture.
