Renovating the New National Gallery by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Berlin
An icon of contradictions

The New National Gallery seems to be an architectural structure of absolute clarity, but it is actually full of contradictions. It is uncompromisingly modern in its construction and material, yet classical in habitus. The glass exhibition hall is a grandiose ideal space, and yet in the lower ground facilities, Mies worked with carpet, wood baseboards and ingrain wallpaper. And the museum is actually not a museum, because the Berlin project is based on the plans for the Bacardi headquarters in Cuba.

Mies adapted the unrealised design when he was commissioned to build an exhibition building at the Berlin Kulturforum in 1961. For this reason, it is no wonder that the huge hall has created problems from the very beginning. The curators at the time fought constantly against the logic of the wall-less room with almost every exhibition—and right before opening, the curtains stuck to the condensation on the glass panes.

However, even after renovation the hall will still not be the ideal exhibition space that meets the strictest conditions of conservation and preservation. The Museum, architects and monument preservationists opted instead to retain the pure spatial experience of the hall and refurbish the bold steel glass structure only in ways that could not been seen. This careful surgical approach was also applied to refurbishment of the facade, which was constructed too rigidly and could not cope with temperature fluctuations in Berlin.

The planners decided to install three posts with expansion joints on each side of the facade and laminated safety glass specially delivered from China, where the only company in the world able to produce the 3.46-meter-wide panels is located.

Insulation glass was not possible for preservation reasons, so instead better ventilation technology was installed to prevent condensation from forming on the glass in future.

The building’s technical installations were completely refurbished throughout, and the architects expanded the lower floor towards Potsdamer Strasse to include an art depository and utility rooms. Visitors will only directly notice this intervention, the most major change to the building, in the bigger service areas in the lower foyer, where space was gained for these.

The working atmosphere between the stakeholders was amazing, according to Martin Reichert, the partner responsible for the project from the Chipperfield firm. A joint excursion to see buildings by Mies in the USA at the start of the planning process was not just informative but also helped with team-building.

Ultimately a great number of partners were involved in the renovation. Everyone agreed on the mission to preserve to an extremely high degree the original history and heritage of the building, even if this sometimes contradicted modern ideas of what a contemporary museum should be.

Only one point was truly controversial among the stakeholders: The Museum really wanted to get rid of the brown carpeting on the lower floor. But the architects and preservationists persisted, and the carpeting was reproduced according to the existing original patterns—in the true spirit of the sixties.

By contrast, the original ingrain wallpaper was not reproduced. Instead, visitors to the gallery will experience the classic modern art on smoothly plastered walls in future. This was not a controversial change, however, as all stakeholders agreed that the original wallpaper would have created too much of an intimate interior environment. But perhaps this view will change as well—the decorators will come in ten or twenty years to bring Mies’ ambivalent icon of international post-war modernism one step closer to its original condition.