A Looser Fit

Barry Bergdoll opened his one-on-one conversation with David Chipperfield Architects with the observation that both have grappled, through their respective writing and building projects, with museum architecture in Berlin. Fittingly, historian and architect spoke from the former Goethe-Institut New York, a 1907 townhouse facing the Met, that Chipperfield’s firm recently won a competition to renovate as a new cultural space. (Disclosure: I curated a small exhibition about the history and future of the building on behalf of the nonprofit group 1014.)

Chipperfield recalled encountering public resistance to his design for the bombed-out Neues Museum—originally completed in 1859 to designs by Friedrich August Stüler, restored 1997–2009 by David Chipperfield Architects—which leaves evidence of the “trauma” of the Second World War. It was “intellectually correct” to preserve the building’s scars, Chipperfield said, but many people asked, “Why can’t we just have the building back as it was?”

Bergdoll then quizzed Sir David about his recently completed restoration of Mies’s …