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 glass temple of a museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie, built in 1968. “It’s a very flawed museum,” Chipperfield said, alluding not only to the difficulties of exhibiting art behind transparent walls, but also to the discovery that portions of the museum were “poorly built,” which he blamed on Berlin’s postwar economic struggles. He described a fascinating problem in the restoration of 20th-century modernist buildings: you can’t “solve all the technical issues without destroying the architecture.” Chipperfield opted to preserve the essential minimalism of the curtain wall, settling for improved but not fully resolved thermal and moisture issues. Rather than simply replace aging window frames and stone pavers with seemingly identical new ones, the Chipperfield firm oversaw the comparatively difficult and expensive repair and restoration of 35,000 original components.
Not everyone agreed with the need to conserve the physical fabric of a 1960s building, Chipperfield said, but he thought, “in an animistic way,” reminiscent of Ruskin, that the spirit of the building resides in such materials.
Asked about the changing functions of museum spaces, Chipperfield declared that he rejects form-follows-function because “it’s hard to say what function is.” Just as a bathroom is more than a toilet stall, a museum is more than a display system. Bergdoll recalled Schinkel’s distinction between the “trivial function” and “higher function” of a museum, but Chipperfield said even mundane functions should be accommodated in flexible ways that allow for change over time. The solution? “Good rooms,” by which he seemed to mean well-proportioned, well-lit, well-finished spaces that can serve whatever purpose their occupants might need. It sounds like Mies’s “universal space,” but Chipperfield pointed to Georgian-era houses whose ample rooms have been reconfigured for different uses over the generations. And don’t forget that buildings should outlast their clients, Chipperfield said. “Museum directors have strong ideas, but they’re not there forever. A loose fit works better.”
Chipperfield’s hope for the future of architecture? Architects need to find a way to “get farther upstream” in planning and politics, he said, if they want to make an impact on the urgent crises of social inequality and climate change. “We’re all trying our hardest, but [so far] it’s not good enough.”