Graduation Project P4 Reflection Interiors, Buildings, Cities Beyond the White Cube Student: Mengyi Dang 4403975 Tutors: Daniel Rosbottom Mauro Parravicini Sam De Vocht Sereh Mandias The relationship between the project and the wider social context The need of the museum complex Neue Nationalgalerie—Museum of the 20th Century (M20) it to situate permanently the Marx and Pietsch collections, the Marzona archive and works from the Museum of Prints and Drawings. It will also be the first time in the history that these collections joining together. The Neuw Nationalgalerie and the Museum of 20th Century (M20) is contently and functionally related. While the site is consists of architectural icons, except for the Neue Nationalgalerie by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, there are Philharmonie, St. Matthew’s Church, and State Library, as well as the Kulturforum built in recent 50 to 60 years. As the future home of the M20, the Kulturforum is the most important location of the Berlin State Museums besides the Museum Island. However, the Kulturforum itself has now agreed by the public having problems in architecture and urban planning. This paper is to look at the problem of the urban and architectural problems of the site and discuss possible approach to the new design of Museum of the 20th Century. Due to the complicity of the history of Berlin, the Kulturforum today is a political and cultural record of the formerly divided city, and one of the most challenging areas of the inner city’s development. The name ‘Kulturforum’ might expect a cohesive image of the area, but the fact is that the visitors are greeted by a quite different picture, a loose assemblage of buildings which is cloven rather than held together by the six-lane Potsdamer Street and the open space outside St. Matthew’s Church. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War and more than 25 years after the fall of the Wall, the Kulturforum has not yet acquired the urban architectural setting it deserves. As a result of the bombing in the Second World War and the demolition of buildings to make spaces for construction of new Berlin, the area of Kulturforum was a waste land. The redesign of the area is a hard task, and the task was picked up by Hans Scharoun and he already formulated a design together with the plan for the entire Berlin in 1946. Hans Sharon’s idea was about ‘ urban landscape’, however his planning of this area was not fully achieved in the history due to different political and finical reasons. Instead, the notion of ‘ urban landscape’ had then became a significant reference use back and forth for people who later on planning and building on this site. Repeatedly and continuously, the ‘urban landscape’ idea was redefined and reformed in the later on architectural and planning ideas. To be specific on the design site itself and the Neue Nationalgalerie by Mies, the site underwent profound changes even before the war. As part of Speer’s redesign of central Berlin, the Potsdamer Platz area was to be razed and rebuilt as the Runder Platz. Although most of Speer’s plan had never realised, this part of the site was begun. Only one segment of the Runder Platz was completed, however; and it was the ruins of this structure that had to be removed in 1966 to make way for Mies Building. A final transformation of the site was undertaken in 1961 when the by the denuded Potsdamer Platz area was crossed by the Berlin wall. The destroyed Tiergarten Quarter as a whole has been rezoned as a cultural quarter of West Berlin. The Philharmonie Hall was the first new building in the area, and had just been completed when Mies was called to Berlin. These basically were the problematic givens confronting Mies. When the construction be Mies begun, there were only three structures on the empty site, the Philharmonie, the rebuilt of the St. Matthew’s Church and a ruin left over from the bombing. These three structures turned the Mies’ plinth into an urban stage by closing off the three sides of the plinth. The gallery itself with the reflection in the glass as proscenium, like a modern cinematic panorama offering a view of the surrounding urban destruction. Unfortunately, Mies’s statement has been considerably weaken by the recent removal of the ruin. However, Mies then figured out a more powerful order. When standing on the southeastern corner of the plinth, the building is fitted precisely into the landscape, as the columns of the gallery, the edge of the St. Matthew’s Church, and the distant Philharmonie are brought into a tight and irrevocable bond. Mies strove to create an acropolis effect, linking art, music and religion over the vast empty of urban destruction. While, on the other side of the site, the Philharmonie by Scharoun, it stood on the site like nothing happened. Scharoun, attempting to return architecture to the ‘ authenticity’ of experience and the revelry of three- dimensional ‘ aliveness’ , created a complex spatial interior that makes reference to the new pluralistic society. Mies held the different understand of the site compared with Scharoun’s approach. He intended to use the empty expanse of the plinth to preserve the emptiness of the site itself. Later on, the statement of the Neue Nationalgalerie has been considerably weakened by the erection of Sharoun’s State Library, which blocks off the essential view of the berlin wall. The later coming James Stirling design trivialised the site by its appliance of castle and church. The information has been taken forward from the site background to the studio design proposal is plenty. One conclusion is that the role of M20 on the site should be mediator instead of other provoking characters from the designer’s own point of view. Even though the site has have enough chaotic problems, it is still impossible to solve all the architectural and planning problem at the same time. It is better for M20 standing in the middle of the Kulturforum acting as a moderator to soften the poignant relationships of the surrounding instead of building another outstanding icon to intensify the context. The reinterpretation of the interior language of the site buildings while working with the volumetric relationship in the urban scale at the same time can be an approach for the proposal. The relationship between research and design The research looked at the changing relationships between museums and people during the history. The period since the middle of the nineteenth century until now has been carefully looked into in the research. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum script was mostly the visitors centred. The apprehension of the importance of spacial quality and objects arrangement within the museum was realised. What was truly innovative was that in the early twentieth century the layout, the architecture, no matter the interior or exterior, and arrangement of museums had been thought about and carried out in practice to guide the viewers in the museums. Orders began to be adapted in the museums, the collections began to be arranged in a chronological order, or the more familiar objects were presented on the ground floor than the ‘high’ on the upper floors. How viewers can better understand and perceive the objects on display was taken into consideration in the script of museums. Museum curators had noticed that the floor plan and layout of the museums should lead the visitors through the spaces and naturally guide them to the most important works.During the journey of viewing , people could gradually gain the knowledge of the display, or at least interpret something related to the display with the assistant of the thoughtful arrangement of the museum. At the same time, the museums act as the role of general education on one hand, it also had to be made accessible through an extensive educational program on the other. There had better to be classrooms for popular education that guided tours, illustrated lecture, guide books, evening openings and concerts had to make the content of the museum accessible to everyone who is interested. However, the museum reformers of the early twentieth century were idealistic in the sense that they overestimated the latent interest in museums among the general population, in particular among the lower social strata. They did not sufficiently realise that taste is not inborn but instead has to be cultivated. In order to interest people from the lower social strata, museums had to compete with other leisure activities. The post-war museums can be seen as continuing the ideal of a sober, unobtrusive display as propagated by the museum reformers of the inner-war years. The post-war museums was characterised by a strategy of self-negation and effacement whereby everything that stood between the observer and the museum had to be removed. As a consequence, anything that reminded the visitors of the meditating role of the museum presentation had to go which allowed a direct, unmediated experience of the artworks and a ‘pure’ perception which brought the observer as close to the art work as possible. After the Second World War, museums quickly expanded their educational programmes to reach out every potential visitor groups. The description of the post-war museum also showed that the desire to reach out to uninformed visitors conflicted fundamental with the ideal of a direct, unmediated contact between observers and objects. In the end, the white cube subsumed the model of the museum as a classroom. When the museum became the museum-as-workplace, visitors were in fact reduced to the artists themselves.