What is the future of the past? David Chipperfield

so welcome everybody so this there's such a nice feeling in this room it's a great room this one I think but there and one of the reasons it's great is every now and then a kind of emotion builds up in it without anybody saying anything and I think in a way the emotion of tonight is the intersection of Paul by Ed and David Chipperfield two super super nice people I don't know if you add nice and nice whether you get super nice or it all falls apart tonight we experiment with that so just first a few words of about Paul and then a few words about David and I have to say any words about either Paul or David are pretty useless because both are very very tender and eloquent personalities of course we know better Paul and and in so many ways Paul is continues to be a teacher in this school because sometimes people can formulate ideas with such a clarity and with such a charm and such an eloquence that the voice keeps resonating and this was of course true of Paul I mean it's great that in the photograph the little thing in the pocket is there when one doesn't know whether Paul was wearing that or that was wearing him but let's say if you ever saw a perfectly folded thing in a pocket you could be pretty sure that about 16 inches above that would be this marvelous marvelous voice coaxing us endlessly coaxing us to understand that we had a responsibility to buildings because Billings had a responsibility to society so this was essentially a very very political position that buildings stood for represented protected housed and challenged our concepts of of the public good in this sense Paul energized the thought that preservation is one of the most progressive acts that one can make one of the most dangerous and progressed of X that one can make and therefore one's responsibility was more in what you kept and preserved and and then and what one added and of course the great challenge that Paul posed to those who saw themselves building everything fast was preservation and to preservationists his challenge was if you're going to save something you have already added something to society that to save something is actually to add and therefore the act of addition itself can be a part of preservation and he challenged us to consider the very very intimate relationship between what you protect and what you add and this of course very much is the central argument at the heart of preservation as an academic field but also as a practical field but also as a field that has devoted itself to expressing affection for the built environment and of course Paul was deeply affectionate person you felt his love for buildings and you felt in some way loved by him when he would talk about those buildings in front of you it has been in that sense something I've been hoping for a while which would be that David would be the person who would give this the first endowed Paul S pile by ad Memorial Lecture because in listening to David described the 12 years of continuous affection expressed to this building in Berlin you could hear what it was that Paul always argued it seems to me Paul's argument would be something like this that the most intelligent the most thoughtful architect probably the most brilliant architect will only do their best work when faced with the challenge of preservation in other words preservation itself would be stimulant to a new level of performance from from from an octave and it says our thought that each of these lectures in honor of Paul should show one of the very best architects in the field having taken their work to another level when face what what with what seems to be a more or less impossible task of preservation and in so doing one finds oneself looking at an object living inside an object thinking about an object in which one could neither say that is old or new but that it is older than one realized there is more there than you could have realized but also the world is new and you will see perhaps in almost each and every image that David shows you this sort of vibration between what has been saved and preserved and what has been added and of course I think one of the great advantages of that is that is the lesson that this is always the case and therefore even when looking at a project like many of David's projects which seems to be wholly new that actually there are acts of preservation involved even in that David's work I'm sure you know extremely well I think nobody does the horizontal bitter this is just somebody that treasures the way that one plane can slightly shave itself over another and then to another and project after project orchestrates itself around this creation of a kind of stairways you don't exactly walk up those stairs but they nevertheless operate as stairs they float of course in the way that since the twenties modern architects should dreamed of floating but this but the horizontals of David are very heavy they're they don't they're not airplanes and they're not making some sort of gesture towards industrialization or speed they are much more Egyptian in their weight so here you have an architect that somehow has fused a kind of density of the building with the aspirations to lightness and transparency one associates with the modern movement this alone of course is reason enough for us to be happy to be here to listen to today words work but I think also to see in this Berlin project and to the other projects that surround it the way in which this play between transparency and weight can operators are very very surgically on the question of memory and to those who associate modernism and pretty much whatever you think I mean by that word monism with some kind of leaving behind of the pasts I think you will understand that david's lectured really has almost the opposite consequence and this was of course the great lesson of of paul of course i'm placing too much of a burden on david that he now becomes as it were a ventriloquist's of Paul wired and his entire life's work now seems to be simply evidence for another man's thinking but it makes a lot of sense to me that that good people have the same ideas and that it can be said by somebody in the field in an office in in a building I can be said by a great teacher Paul was the greatest of teachers no question I believe the same is true of David so it's a real pleasure that he's here tonight thank you very much I'm not sure I can live up to this occasion and those kind words I am going to explain try to explain the work we did on the noise musing Berlin it's I I don't normally give a lecture just on the on the building and this is the first time I've done that so I will struggle at moments to try and bring out other ideas I suppose that it's it's quite difficult in once professional career to to to know where a project like this would lead one and what it might offer you when when we won this project when we began the competition I certainly was not very well informed or opinionated about issues of conservation or restoration and in fact I wasn't quite sure whether you know what what we had won whether this was going to be ten years of slightly earnest important but rather dull you know rebuilding of of an old building and in there you know in a way I mean assessing I mean it was 12 years and it was it was something that we were so close to during those years it was quite difficult even you know I find it quite difficult to stand back to understand you know to be able to explain all the all the issues because they are complex but I suppose all the time I was always concerned about to what degree you know what can one learn from this and and two years after the opening which it you know yes I think it's been a sort of an opportunity to - I suppose confirm to myself the lessons that I think were beyond the the particularity z' of the project itself I suppose in some ways the most important for me because it's a sort of strange thing in a way one wants to explain architecture but in a strange way for me the architecture is the least important aspect of this project which sounds a strange thing for an object to say but I'll try and explain what I mean by that the the build the building has a certain and had as a ruin a certain resonance in a certain meaning it was sort of loaded before we stepped into the interval onto the stage and that put us for the best part of in a decade into a dialogue and that dialogue was not only with the building that we found because what we found was an extraordinary pile of you know a geological pile as much as a historical part we we were we were in the midst of something which had an extraordinary physical presence and meaning the meaning not only in terms of what it was originally but what the events of the 20th century had done to it in order for us to proceed in any meaningful way we needed a dialogue and we needed a dialogue with you know in a prosaic way with our clients in all the guises that the client existed and you can imagine in Germany in the Bureau you know doing public project of this sort that you know is a complex thing in itself but in a way more importantly a dialogue with public opinion and the sort of emotions of the the citizen I suppose so let me well in that sense I think that this dialogue was was something which was was absolutely critical to to our performance and and the the the sort of aftertaste for me for this project the things which I came away with you know all architects you know feel that you know the formal result I mean we can all beat ourselves up about aspects of the former with formal decisions that we make and that's that goes with the territory but I think that the lasting the things which last familiar have the lessons for me have been first of all that I think we tend to under we tend to underestimate the general public's attachment to Architecture and I think this is a very critical thing for our profession I think we have isolated ourselves we don't have a healthy dialogue I mean it's quite shocking sometimes how poor the conversation that we have as a profession with the public which is important because that affects the climate within which we can we can work and and I think that those the expectations of the public and how we how we deal with those expectations I think are quite critical and in this project we were we couldn't we couldn't escape that dialogue and I that was in a way a very important lesson okay let me then give some background to to the project this is an aerial view obviously of the center of Berlin I think this slide was taken you can still see the roof of the old palace of the republic which has since been taken down and is another chapter in Berlin's history and read ascription of its own history it's often said that every city has history and berlin has too much and as if they don't have enough they keep remaking it and you you're familiar I'm sure with the debate that has has raged about what should happen to the to the schloss that's a story I don't really want to touch it touch on here but again it exposes this condition that exists in Berlin about about its history about how this the enormous trauma of the Second World War has has meant that everything has meaning and everything is discussed and that that has produced reactions which are quite diverse on the one hand there is a desire probably it's a generational thing and the one hand as a desire in a way to get rid of scars as quickly as possible and and maybe find again the the Old Prussian city that mentality has as has instigated projects like the schloss a complete you know a proposal now to completely copy the facades of the the old palace and it's in its it has it's a subject which pervades all discussions in Berlin this view was showing the wrinkles wonderful noise altas Museum originally the royal palace and this faced the schloss the cathedral the university the army barracks were here so this really was the center of the Prussian Empire after shingles after the completion of shingles outers museum as a as a royal museum the first real museum in a way and on the death of england 1831 the the plants were were developed to expand the museum island by Stila or Vistula a protege of Schinkel and he generated a sort of mini master plan creating a colonnade garden and providing a new entrant world providing an entrance to the east to the new building of the noise museum and later the National Gallery the device of the colonnaded courtyard was incredibly intelligent one because it really made these two buildings a sort of on somber establish a relation to the loose garden and to unter den Linden and to the to the schloss itself so this was a very clever device meaning that the noise museum which was face it you know was entered from from the east and the National Gallery then had this relation this the rest of the island was was gradually developed first of all with the the bird museum and then later in 80 in the 1930s were completed by Nestle the Pergamon museum that the island is really separated by the Pergamon museum the the intelligent planning of these two buildings that mystically bringing them into a sort of dialogue with Alice Garden and in a way peripherally past the outers Museum - to this Center was sort of shattered when it came to the north north end of the museum Island so there with the construction of the Pergamon there there was a sort of never sort of cut here so if you want to go to these two buildings you have to go off the island that out now because it becomes an important part of the planning of the museum Island project all of the buildings of the museum island work were badly bombed and the noise museum itself was firebombed as early as 1943 1943 and then finally it was a sort of him so the last post of resistance and was badly damaged in the very final days of the war and it suffered enormous damage but in a way so did all of the other buildings the other buildings were quite quickly restored after the war to various degrees of quality and were all opened again to the public the noise museum remained as a ruin until the early 80s during the GDR period there was there were plans to there were many discussions about what should happen to it it was used provisionally a roof was put over a temporary roof was put over and in the 1980s there were plans to profoundly reconstruct in fact to carry out a total historical replication the reason it remained the ruin is very much part of its story and and part of has is connected very much to to the issues that are presented why did it stay so long as a roan it was badly bombed and the territory on which the soil on which it sits is particularly weak and in fact cracks started appearing in the building very early on in us in his life but the reasons that that it's that it stayed and rebuilt I think were were more to do with its nature the nature of it as a museum just so on this you can see this was quite sure when the slide was taken but probably early 90s yes you can see actually that the National Gallery is being restored at that time so so mid 90s you can see the noise museum site and here you can see that the whole North West Wing completely lost the southeast the raziel it's completely lost and this is the staircase where you'll see later this was completely destroyed and you can see that all the other buildings are functioning and this was still his building and finally fully completed in 1918 50s there were there were many partial occupations of the building and through its through some lengthy construction but finally was completed and it housed an important number of collections of diverse number of collections in some ways but in a very particular manner while the the outers museum was a was a series of rooms and and and in a way rather conventional display of objects the the noise museum was was an integration of artifacts and architecture the idea of the museum was to to demonstrate civilization and therefore the the objects you can see here this is on the first floor these are all plaster cast so the the objects were sort of supporting role to the story of the story that the stories that the museum was was telling so the architecture was loaded the the walls were covered in frescoes and had you know were were part of the exhibit so there was a very strong connection between the architecture and the objects I'm sure we avoided a sort of total presentation and that was its power in the way going back let me just say the few other things that what was interesting about that museu logical strategy is that already by the end of the 19th century it was really being questioned and was really sort of out of out of fashion so when the the new Egyptian discoveries were were made and given to the museum in 1920s by James Simon the museum curators themselves modified the interiors and in some ways vandalized many of these rooms creating a more neutral backdrop within which the new objects could be shown so there was already before the the great damage of the war there was already a slow transformation of the museum the curse of us of shifting the shifty fashions of a museum display it became you know it was the strength and in the way the weakness of the noise museum that its decoration was so my part the decoration and the displays was so much part of it and I think in a way that's why after the war it was particularly difficult to understand how to reconstruct the building not only technically but also philosophically if if by by the 1930s that type of decoration supporting museum displays had already become out of fashion then it was a sort of strange idea than in a way to having lost them to try and recreate them in in a museum context these slides show the the extent of the damage so this is after the war you can see how the other buildings have been restored the National Gallery the side the south side of the Pergamon Museum and this is the roof of shingles Altos Museum and here you can see the the lost corner at the dome southwest own south east dome of noise museum you can see this staircase completely destroyed here that's the pediment of mr. two ends of the staircase hall and the whole northwest and from the other side and then looking you can see that the whole west southwest wing was also bombed and the facade was destroyed all the way down to the ground floor so that the rooms that survived this were on are on the east side and you can see effectively the north west wing the staircase itself and most of the South West Wing are destroyed um those those of us have well the building state is around for 50 years and in a way settle down into becoming or you know it sort of took on the manner of a ruling in a way and those people that went into the building in that state were incredibly impressed by the sort of raw Piron Asian quality of the room it was a sort of powerful physical space and it had the the destruction had brought everything back to its rawness the brickwork was exposed and this was something you know in a way sad but also quite powerful and it was difficult to imagine when when we first looked at the project where we spent quite a while on it it was it was difficult to imagine losing all of those qualities and of course it it pushes one dangerously into an appreciation of ruination in itself but I think we were interested in you know why why was the ruin itself fascinating because it had been the ruin as long as it had been a building and it had matured in a way as a run and it was quite in I mean this is just an aside to just to look at we were looking at you know why wider ruins fascinators and certainly in the case of noise museum I think it was the sort of raw material quality I think there's another you know that this is some James Fenton rivo Abbey which is a beautiful photograph you know Fenton was one great early for photograph's and did many such photographs you know obviously romanticizing the idea of the ruin but there's something rather beautiful about the idea that architecture nearly becomes natural you know that it nearly it survives beyond you know its time and nearly yes nearly finds us or the natural position and that Caspar David Friedrich me and I mean the idea of the ruin is something that that occurs continuously and he was Gandhi's painting for for Sir John Soane for the Bank of England which I think was an extraordinary idea to show the building that you are constructing as a ruin as if as if ruination is a test of good architecture you know the best the best buildings become the best ruins and there was a sort of double and there was for ambiguity in this drawing that in some sense it sort of shows it in construction in another sense you can read it as destruction and obviously referring to its it's the idea of permanence and and the reference to sort of classical architecture I think even more interesting is these two drawings also by guarantee of one of the banking halls interiors one of the building finished in its decorated state and more interestingly the other in its sort of and it's naked construction which i think is an extraordinary modern image and it's difficult to know why why you did this except again to show the power of the and the materiality and the the substance of the original architecture and in the way others this is influenced by looking at Roman ruins and etc etc this this sort of physical fit the physicalness of an unfinished building or a ruined building seems to be a sort of you know and once appreciation of there seems to be a sort of sad testament to our to our lack of enthusiasm often for the finished finished thing I mean how many times does one go past a construction site and see about a beautiful concrete frame and you sort of think well that's quite interesting the cores that are in the stairs are there and you think it's going to be a great building and then you come past a month later and the cladding is up and it just looks like every other crappy commercial building so underneath you know there is this you know there's something about what's underneath architecture often that is important and that's something that before I go there um that was something that I found very fascinating in people's you know because we lived with the the ruin for five years and we worked we did the planning process took five years so during that five years we we did have to take people around and of course of it politicians and others but also just other architects and other members of the public and it was interesting how there was a certain you know empathy that the ruin exposed itself and it's and it's in its physicality in its matter in a way that allowed people to sort of you know to relate and that seemed to me something quite special and seemed to me something which was you know in danger of being lost the particular story of ruins in post-war Germany is obviously a much more complex story this well it's the ruin Church in the center of the first and down which then was stabilized and dealt with by by iamin who originally proposed a much more radical scheme but after discussions kept the the tower as a sort of monument and then built a new building the new church next to it was rather in a way by the beautiful version the frowned clerk in Dresden the commitment from you know from very little to rebuild the whole to restore the the building was another one of those prolonged German discussions but in this case something which you know might in another context be questionable was probably quite justifiable in the context of Dresden with the unification of Germany and the you know in the way that the building of the future and commitment to a unified Germany and and in a way to to the citizens of Dresden commitment by Helmut Kohl to to rebuild that was a very symbolic thing so I just want to say that within the idea at well certainly within in Germany you know I think there are so many versions of dealing with with damage and ruination but there's not one particular way I think it's a case by case the case that that in a way stimulated arson and became a touch them as a reference was dull cast reconstruction of the in Aquatech in in Munich where as you can read he reconstructed large areas of the facade not trying to copy the decoration but but trying to again complete the the form I mean he did radical interventions when planning inside the building but this idea of of repairing and and completing seemed to us a precedent which was one we should follow and in a way it's a precedent which exists in archaeology without even questioning I mean there's this there's no doubt that if you have the fragments of a grief fast you don't attempt to repair and restore in such a way that you would confuse the original with with new but the fragments are given meaning and the giving given sense by sorry by the fact that they are you know put into an overall shape so if they if the fragments sit on the table they don't really mean much but it doesn't you know we can if we have enough fragments we can use sort of mutual material to embed the fragments in and create a context within which the fragments sit and give meaning to those fragments we don't then we're not tempted to then to complete horses tails or the missing pieces and and nor are we when it comes to the repair paintings they're rather controversial repair of the Last Supper but clearly an attempt to suppress I mean a very difficult restoration a clearly one that was trying to suppress the effects of damage more than find again what was lost it's a more complex thing to do in architecture if only for the reason that architecture has to deal with weather and climate building regulations in this case the whole process of German bureaucracy and approvals and and and all of the other technical issues that go with that territory you can see here that the complexity of the damage and I think that was one thing that was so difficult with the noise museum you can see also that it was a brick it's a brick building with the stucco surface the stucco surface is there to sim simulate stonework Berlin is not minerally rich most of the buildings are brick and stucco this sucker was was particularly fine and had a polychromatic decoration but you can see that within a very short very small area of the building every level of damage exists from the total loss of the southeast corner to substantial areas of damage to other places where you know window frames and the architectural detail are still there the it was necessary in a way I mean it was I would be lying if I knew from the beginning how we you know that we knew exactly how we were going to do what we wanted to do but it was quite important to clarify our intentions and in fact the first thing we had to do was to write sort of a sort of philosophical paper about what our approach would would be and that paper gave us a sort of umbrella under which we could operate because normally if you're designing a building you would get the drawings approved so you would you make a concept in the client says yes that's a nice concept and then you you develop that to schematic and they say yes it's a nice schematic in you then you so all the processes are processes are approved and they've approved on drawings and specifications in the case of noise Museum we couldn't really say exactly what the end result of our five years of designing would be at the beginning so we had to find methods by which we could find approval for the next level of exploration so the umbrella was first of all a sort of philosophical description and it was you know within that there were certain clear commitments said the first was to rebuild the the the mass of the building and to rebuild the two RIA teve the plan the the spatial sequence of pillars original building but I would have to say it was a very unusual process that that allowed us allowed us to explore and develop the design you know with the with you know as it were on site I mean we there were parts of parts of this building that were you know only approved parts of our project were only approved you know nine months before the building was completed there are other parts which were which were approved ten years earlier so it was a sort of very strange approval process and I suppose the reason that that that was necessary or at least it wasn't necessary was something that we were able to negotiate because again I would say that I think if we achieved anything on this project it was a sort of it was a working environment I think that that we couldn't have we couldn't have done anything this complex whether you like it or not you know whether whether the physical results are correct the fact that we could take a building such as this and maintain a continuous dialogue both within the walls as a world and outside the walls while we were developing our our ideas I think that was our achievement and that was a really difficult thing to achieve in a way logistically within the constraints of a public building in in Germany it was also difficult to achieve because the diversity of expectations about what what we would be doing were you know it was very complex the the city building conservation department really saw this project as an exercises of restoration the museum's saw it obviously from a completely different perspective they had whole shopping list of things that they needed and they saw noise museum as a sort of blank piece of paper that could cope with many of the logistic issues that the museum island suffered from you have to think in a way that this complex of museums had in a way being frozen since 1939 when the doors were closed they were reopened during the GDR period but of course they were opened in a very civil provisional manner so the infrastructure that existed on the island as is was not prepared you know it was it was somehow you know out of its chronological you know history the museum Island was being re opened having is it worth being asleep for 50 years so the museum's were approached this project as part of a larger master planning project not just on its cert on its own but actually with with with one eye on how the whole museum complex might work in the future and in fact when we won the competition the museums anticipated that the Noize museum would become a sort of entrance building but this would become the front door for the whole museum island and when we won the competition we had to refuse this strategy because it would have meant that there were been would have been no way to recreate the structure of the existing building so we we arrived in in Berlin in a way on this project in a situation where there had been enormous frustration because the first competition held in 1994 ended in the disaster the museum director refused to work with Georgia Grassi in a way humiliating him how many of us are really an unacceptable treatment of Gracie who came with a very good project in a way not for not so much for the noise museum but for the extension and the master plan of museum Island they had lost five years there was complete disharmony between the city between the museum's and between the building Commission's so it was important for us to find a way to work together and to find a sort of common ambition these images show the state of the ruin that we inherited you can see that there again in an inside this is the South West Wing I showed you from from outside bombs had completely destroyed the floors all the way through to the basement and a large section of the facade but at the same time you can see there are parts of the architecture and even parts of the decoration which survived the same space you know a space in a way created by the bombs and in contrast other spaces where the damage was fairly superficial or least on the face of it superficial the bombs had not done much damage but the the damage had been done by water penetration through the roof in fact you can see here all the coffers are broken all the steel work in the building was in a bad condition because of that still a was anxious well had to keep the weight of the building down he it's a three storey Museum the first three storey Museum hmm on very difficult soil so he engaged innovative at the time techniques of cast-iron still work not not highly expressed normally sort of then covered in zinc but they were very clever attempts to reduce the load as well as another method of hollow clay pots which he'd in a way I think borrowed from stones work at Bank of England so it was a complet it's technically a complex building you can see in this space that though that it there are parts of it that survived in very good tack you know the decoration here is really not bad these are the only real stone real marble columns in the whole building the the in the same way that the outside of the building is stuck over the inside of the building is a marble plaster stuck elicitor which is very high quality extraordinary quality which is nearly in some ways needed more beautiful than marble so all of the door frames and things like that were were done in this high-density marble plaster and you see other rooms the the back of Sal from connects two important rooms on the first floor with the Pompeian decoration and a lot of this you know even the floors intact but at the same time in this from terrible destruction to the ceiling and actually to the other wall mythological room this was the one of the central rooms of lepsius project the first director of the egyptian museum had very center graphic ideas about how to present the egyptian collection so all of these rooms were were highly decorated these were painted wallpapers the walls were also painted and this is one of the rooms where they in 1922 9023 they put a full ceiling through this and painted all the walls because they this rather Center graphic backdrop was much too powerful for the case of 1920s there were substantial modifications at that time when the ceiling came down it exposed the original wallpaper and you can see here these white had the crude pieces of steel work that hung the false ceiling which ran around the space to this to that level this was in a very bad condition which it had to be taken aha done again other rooms and the beams out again in a very reasonable condition so we had a rather complex task that parts of the building were missing and other parts of the building were there and damaged we had some rooms where the decoration as well as the architecture was still intact in other rooms where nothing was left and we had every spectrum between um I was rather concerned that the the ambition at the end should be for a sort of singular building I I wasn't convinced by the idea that there should be a high level of definition and even a sort of rhetorical expression of new versus old the the damage was so diverse and ran continuously through the building that it didn't seem to me that there was any straight lines in the building in terms of what one might express as new and what one might express as old so we were convinced and and and in terms of our professional process we worked with Jude inheritance a very respected restoration and architect and it was sort of foreseen it's often foreseen on a project like this that the restoration architect does the old rooms and you know the modern architect does in all the new rooms and we completely resisted this and in fact Julian supervised the team within our own office so that we were in control of all spaces and that Julian was a sort of fun policeman you know I said it was a bit like hiring a policeman to do a bank raid that you know it was good to have someone on your side who who knew where all of the issues would be coming from and and how we might approach project and I think that was a very important decision that we didn't see this as two projects as a you know the new bitten and the obits and therefore we needed to develop a strategy which which brought the project together in terms of how we proceeded what we did was to photograph every surface of the building so every floor and every window frame every ceiling every wall every doorframe was photographed and and put onto computer and that meant that we we had a document of everything that was there as our base because philosophically our approach was that we wanted to build out from what what existed our rule was that all original material must stay and that put us into a very in a way innocently we didn't I suppose know quite what we were doing at the time it it meant that you know a number of other decisions run from that because if you keep everything then you inevitably have to find a line between the new and the old the the easiest thing and this is the ceiling of one of the you can see the pots on the ceilings this is so this damage which is progressively worse towards the south broke off the plaster exposes the pot we're sealing but at the same time there are moments where we can see the original decoration and we can see the vision how how do we deal with that and how do we deal with with that within the context of that Roman and how do we deal with that in context of the room next to it etc etc so this process of of first of all protecting and cleaning then allowed us to to simulate by a computer so that last drawing will be the basis and then on the computer program we would simulate solutions of repair of restaurant of repair and and completion and for instance in this this case the idea was to suppress the damage by continuing you know you know soft render the pattern that the trellis work ceiling but not to continue the color there wasn't enough color on remaining to legitimize the idea that we would paint the whole ceiling once we had an approval for that strategy then that would be turned into drawings and drawings like this that would then be given to the conservators and then they would try and achieve what we asked them to do and then they would do that in reality and then we were the one inspected again with twenty or thirty bureaucrats there proving whether it was acceptable or not um that process went through all of the all of the rooms so I just going to show a few versions of that so the the issue was but if you trying to keep these fragments if you're trying to keep the elements which are there and you can see in this room this is the buckets are which connecting the near bins are in the room from which we just saw which was here you can see that there was a decoration of a trellis and vines and this was meant to be a sort of garden like run with the produce guy but also you can see that's very little less so the question was not that you you know in this in a space like this you couldn't in a way it was this there's there's too much damage to to recreate that everywhere on the other hand what one really doesn't want to see all of the damage that's there that the arguments that we had during the planning phase which were enormous I mean there I think there was I think during the process of the noise museum there was something like 500 newspaper articles in Germany about articulating different opinions about what we should be doing but the the strongest argument against what we were doing is that we were celebrating damage you know we were making a war room and we were too too concerned with showing the marks of the war and all of these things of course our argument was that we weren't trying to show damage but we were trying to keep the original material and in in the keeping of that original material therefore there are very difficult moments where you are in a way inevitably showing the the sort of discordance II of surface but what we were trying to do in that press and this was the method we used was to look for ways by which the damage would be suppressed further and further back so that there was a certain superficial harmony that could be achieved in the space so you can see that while we didn't necessarily try and copy the decoration of the trellis of some light blue wash at least gave the sense of the ceiling in the sky and that the other washes on the on the exposed brickwork and the sort of the articulation of certain framing elements and cleaning certain things up and creating new moldings in certain places was to do with framing that damage and if we transfer that into three dimensions this is then the South the South extreme south of the building looking towards the missing dome room so that's the bit that's completely destroyed you can see that big destruction at that end of the room you can see there's some pendentives still that with their decoration the columns were still there this was a test that we had to do I mean the other thing that goes niti unspoken about this building was that we not only did we have to to repair and restore it we had to make it work again as the 21st century museum with full air-conditioning full lighting and of course a structural loading that would support the exhibits and the visitors of a contemporary museum so we also needed these these columns and all the columns in the building we needed not only because they were part of the memory of the building part of the language of the building part but they were also structural and we had to then prove them to be structural so we did that in this case by taking a slice out of this and we had to do that to many of the columns to test the loading of this and then there was one point where this column was was cut and the hold of the basement was was excavated and was frozen to keep it so that one was rather nervous the building would not survive so you see then the gradual reconstruction using brickwork commissioning one man to make 40,000 clay pots to rebuild the missing Volks and coffers then gradually you can start to see the sort of techniques that we were using to you know recreate some times so that's an original piece this is a brickwork you know ghost but in this case this is a you know a fake copy because we needed to complete that arch so there all sorts of different one-by-one solutions to getting ourselves out of the corner that we painted ourselves into I mean the philosophical strategy seemed really clear and everyone you know absolutely went along with it and I think what was very interesting was that while I tend to characterize the process as being a bureaucratic one I would have to say that the dominant atmosphere was an intellectual one I mean we stood for hours and hours over this 10 years in freezing weather discussing what a small patch of render meant and whether that render I mean there was one place where we wanted to take a piece of render away and everybody argued that that was against our philosophy how can you possibly do that but our feeling was it was slightly stranded and just looked decorative I think we must have spent three or four hours at three different meetings talking about you know what that render meant and that was you know incredible privilege to be within it with a group of people that were you know representing the clients representing all the vested interests and even politicians and that were willing to discuss the ideas of the project and I think that was that was what was so powerful about the whole process but we had put ourselves often into into a corner that was very difficult to work one's way out of you know what should one do in certain moments this is a room where clearly again the the decoration had been so eroded that we couldn't although we know that their room is that was that color the idea of painting all the walls blue was something that we rejected fairly early on on the other hand we started to learn that the floors were incredibly important thing that holding together rooms where where the decoration had been substantially lost although again I would say what held these rooms together was the sort of structure and I think that I developed a great affection for the domes and vaults during this project because I think there they were it was it was quite interesting how how strong those articulated rooms were and how they managed you know themselves and in the way road above the the fragmentary quality it's just showing that process of um you know it's a sort of patchwork where in the end you want everything to disappear and then that process we did for all of the damaged rooms this is the the other cupola room than the north and you can see all of the North Kipling you can see the water damage that happened you can see all that the different you know although it wasn't bad it wasn't bombed it was very badly this was the computer simulation of what we would like to achieve and then that's the final solution you can see that the the damage is still there but it's suppressed the water damage is suppressed but there's there's always an idea of suppressing and cleaning and repairing but never one of well rarely one of total completion perhaps the most complicated space was the staircase this ridiculous magnificent hall with the quotes from Greek classical architecture the calbeck freezes telling once again telling story of civilization and this extraordinary promenade from the this is the front door the front door which had a doorbell by the way you rang you rang the doorbell and someone would open the door for you and take your coats and then you would come in and you would go up and then move so a very extraordinary room defined by its staircase completely destroyed this is it in the 50s some of the this was still existed as a brickwork frame you can see a little bit of a staircase still there which actually remained and some of the portal computer simulation we work for one year on this again this was during you know wild works were even going on we were still discussing alternatives for the staircase the museum's originally saw this as a place where we could impose a modern space change the building substantially and give recognition to that change we looked at versions of that but the rule itself its dimensions and the logic of the placement of the windows and the promenade that the the room the original room had somehow always demanded that the stair should be put back so our strategy was to to put the original form of the stair back in a reduced stripping version of that obviously and and that this became the the sort of default material in the same way that the gypsum is is that embed you know the the repairing material of archaeological objects this white concrete became our repair element so as neutral as material could be as a sort of slightly passive and supportive supportive element and the finished and you can see in this you know the range of elements that we have from the from the new impose elements recreating the form of before X walls exposed by damage which are highly manicured I have to say I mean the walls that look as if they've just been left obviously not just left there they're very cosmetically cleaned up and and try to you know I mean to make something look as if it should be there it's quite difficult something and again there was these walls were very badly damaged and that badly repaired during DDI period so we had to do a lot of work to read to get that so there are no innocent surfaces here I have to admit that and then other parts of the building this this is where there was a big fire you can see the blackened Brit work that was very difficult to deal with but we accepted that this was a completely new construction recreating the old balcony so those and new coffers in order that the columns which had been saved and left outside could be replaced there was a final discussion six months before the opening of the building where again 30 people stood at the top of the staircase and I was attacked for keeping the dirt when we were attacked for keeping the dirt on these columns the columns had been badly burned during the fire and then they were put outside and the dirt remained on there on there shadowed side as it were and was washed off on the clean side when we put them back up we decided to keep the suit and the argument by the general director in us in and again I think we had two or three meetings about it was that this dirt this is the only place and every other surface in the building we cleaned every other place we repaired if you're keeping this dirt it must mean something so what does this dirt mean to the project and that was a sort of a typical discussion and now you can see the dirt so you know we we mumbled various excuses but in the end it was a sort of picturesque one I think that that it you know somehow the the the journey that these columns had had that they'd been burnt they'd been taken out of the building we'd put them back in and we'd rebuilt the balcony put them somehow made them into sort of exponents in themselves and we were just shy of cleaning them off there was something meaningful about that dirt so these are now just running through a series of slides showing the completed project the missing dome wrong.we I showed you the room where Nefertiti is the equivalent of that room was completely just destroyed and we wanted to make a modern dome so we again the we use two two materials one was the concrete that I showed you the other was obviously the second-hand bricks that were used as a binding together of the building and our idea was to build as many architects have done a dome on I'm sorry a dome on a square base we thought that that would be very powerful as a as a brick you know nearly a sort of minimal version of the original but instead of being as it were the original without its decoration we wanted it to become slightly more primitive and slightly more essential as a brick construction we then realized as architects before has realized that it's not quite as simple as that in such a geometry if you if you take the cross-section that way you have an ellipse and if you take it that way you have a semicircle so that means that when you lay these bricks they have to rise up towards a corner and then rise down again so every row of bricks has to be at a slant so we built a one to ten model in our office to try and work out how to do this before talking to them contractors because we thought we had to work out how it should be done first so we nearly did it ourselves and we took months and months and and then in fact we inherited the the brick builders from the threat from Dresden who come from the frontier who were absolutely experts and they just looked at the modern to say well we don't need that we know how to do it and they did it um one of the things I said some moment was that we really didn't want the idea of an old building a new building we felt that the strategy should be to build a new building out of the old building the difficulty for us was that we were always working with our noses against the walls as it were I mean everything was covered and everything was it was very difficult for us to get a sense of how the old and the new would go together but it was credit you can see even in something like this that there were there are parts of the building this is all new this section and there's one part that was the facade part of the facade of a protected protected it was it was a piece that managed to be protected so and you get new new parts and old parts overlapping so that that line was something that we tried to avoid but we didn't quite know how it would show itself there are places of course where the new is more dominant in their places where the old is more dominant but there the idea was that these things would come together and we worked from the beginning with the museum directors because if you do a museum if you build a new museum then from the beginning you provide as much flexibility technical flexibility as possible you put tracks and lighting in to anticipate all possibilities in the building that had no lighting tracks and actually had no lighting then and you have coffered ceilings and you have historic ceilings in them then you are quite you know discreet you have to be much more careful about providing that level of flexibility and but at the same time you have to anticipate what's going to happen in those spaces and not okay this is not the right slide show that because here's we have rooms where we built new rooms and those spaces can you know I mean in these spaces we could provide the museum with the flexibility that they they wanted these are again that's all in the same concrete these are single pieces of concrete concrete beams and the rooms are modeled on the proportions of the historic but I promise the new but what the because we had to be careful of our we wanted to discipline where lighting could be and how the air condition could work within the historic fabric therefore we had to discuss from the very beginning day from the very first days the placement of objects and to hype you know to make hypothetical arrangements about where objects in rooms might want to go and what levels of lighting we could achieve everything we did on the inside we had to achieve obviously on the outside and that was a much more complex thing because we you saw earlier the photograph of this section of the building the Colin colonnade was substantially rescue ball and where wasn't we could patch stonework stonework is much much easier to restore and to and to to patch than is render and in the case of the render for places where the surface is cleaned and repaired there are other places where there's a slurry over the brickwork and there are other places where the brickwork second interpreter is exposed this is a South facade and a South facade completed and you again you can see the repertoire of treatment so that the cleaned and repaired plaster work with its polychromatic decoration and and when there are when there are smaller repairs then they're done within that concept but when they get bigger then we don't try to replaster on the first surface so if that's if that's first surface then this is the second surface which is the brickwork plus a slurry and when there are whole new segments then we leave that as the naked brickwork so that you see this building up as if as if it were the whole building you know it sort of explains that the whole building is this underneath it's great work then that's the West facade and then a quick tour through the building completed and I think this I think the success the build is based first of all in the fact that it is built beautifully I mean the quality that one can achieve in Germany is extraordinary I think that the discussions the dialogues meant that that the decisions were at least well articulated and the options and alternatives were were well discussed and rehearsed so nothing is accidental everything has been tested I think that the the continuity between the old and the new in rooms like this you can see obviously the repair is very subtle and other rhombuses more complex but that continuity is something that one you know is it's you don't feel like you're moving from from one climate to another that continuity I think brings you you know one has the sense that you're in the same building which i think is very important obviously the you know that the building takes on nearly an archaeological dimension in itself which is fitting for them and probably even more fitting the the famous fries by Shiva Beynon is the is the fleeing from Pompeii not to the the explosion the disaster of Vesuvius oh there was something very potent about this destroyed image of destruction you know destroyed building Nefertiti the star of the collection and you know other rooms which are in sort of better condition you know as if the room you know one had to respond run by wrong in this room there was a lot of the wall color still left and therefore you know bringing that that color back was very important I just very briefly just to finalize the the the description the project just to bring this the final part of it I mean we are we've been working on the master plan to Muse Emma this is noise Museum this is the wonderful colonnade called the northern half which locates both the entrance of the National Gallery and the entrance and to the to the noise museum relation to the loose garden we we have been working the the the noise museum is designed we as I said before we rejected the idea that the building would become an entrance in itself the first master plan that we inherited was that you would enter the noise museum and then go to the other buildings from it we resisted that and therefore came up with a new master plan and that master plan brings subterranean connections between those which we have built already in so in fact the reason that the Egyptian courtyard is sort of reorganized substantially is that that you will arrive from the Pergamon in the lower level of the Egyptian courtyard that will be your sort arrival space but now in construction is a is a new building which will be the the infrastructure building for the museum Island as I said the the buildings didn't come originally with the expectation of the visitor numbers of such a complex now as we anticipate between 4 and 5 million visitors a year for the museum Island therefore we need something which binds the buildings together you can see from this drawing that our concept is to extend in a way the colonnade and make our building part of that concept here is the master plan so there is a subterranean connection that will link all the collections together because these are all the archaeological collections it's important that you can go from one to the other and the site of the new entrance building which will become a way by which mass you know large visitor groups can enter you will always be able to go to each separate museum through the front door but this will be so that the orchestrated tour system again - just to explain where the idea comes from the idea comes from this colonnade the idea that the museum island sits in the water everywhere the architecture museum island sits in the water on all sides except the side that we're working this is the east side of the noise museum you can see the original form for - cupola National Gallery and from this you can also understand this concept of museum Islanders are being a sort of you know Athens of the North Acropolis of Berlin and so this colonnade concept which here is the restored colonnade for the noise museum and here it runs you know that's where originally finished this by the way is another building that we built this is the the gallery private gallery building a different strategy in a way of completing the block but it's a different story yeah that's the same girl you have a wit we do have a bit of a monopoly on this corner there then and and again I you know it's another project which plays with the idea of mass and and completion and at the same time the balance between you know something which is responding to context and in a way achieving a certain autonomy but to go back we struggled enormous lis with what a new building on the museum island would be our reference was first of all the colonnade and secondly I thought this image of Schinkel of the view from the first floor of the psyche prisoner the first floor of the altas museum looking back out over the lost garden to the to the schloss was a very beautiful idea of sort of public space the museum as a continuation of public territory in a way these people are are standing here but actually they haven't gone inside of them they're inside a building but they've never gone through a door so they know there's some very beautiful gesture by this type of architecture and the museum island is this piling up of of stairs and colonnades and porticos so our building in a way disguises itself as a building by borrowing the elements which are there so we take the base of the Pergamon we create you know architecture an architectural wall to the river in the way that that it is all the way around the island on the north end we extend the colonnade and make that a sort of loop through and we create a building which is in a way and well I can go back at teller I mean that the we we tried since nineteen and in defining what this building was we discovered that the program in other words the program of temporary exhibition space lecture hall cafe restaurant things like that could not give us a satisfactory representation so the idea of representing in a way a room or a place where people might meet in a place which is in a way highly public became a sort of tactic so via so the idea was that is that this is a sort of unprogrammed space rather like Mises National Gallery I suppose that all the hard work is done in the in the sock or in the base which is where the temporary exhibition is and whether changing it and where the auditorium is and this which is a connector and in fact connects the North End of the museum Island in the south end of the museum Island because as I explained before there is no satisfactory factory connection so this will be a way into the puggly from the southern collection of buildings and the building then presents itself as a something which is borrowing historical language of the island in some ways I think it's a sort of ambiguous architecture in some sense I think it's it's extremely severe and I think more radical than people are expecting I mean the interesting thing was again going back to the dialogue you know over these 10 years we we did maintain that's a strong dialogue with the people of Berlin and through public lecture through discussions through through newspapers through through presentations of the project of the noise museum and that process also continued obviously on this project which will be the first new building on the museum island next to Schinkel understood and Messel so it's a highly sensitive site but it was interesting that the the discussion has been really quite positive but again I think because there's an understanding of the idea then the discussion of the architecture becomes much easier to to broker so this shows this sort of idea of you know the sort of urban scale elements which already exist in this in the campus of the museum island the sort of urban scale staircases and colonnades and in a way portico of the building as a sort of portico it's now it's been in construction for the last two years we have we are confronting the same terrible ground conditions that Schinkel and stood have both dealt with this was the site of the shingles pact off buildings in fact we removed in the construction process a lot of shingles wooden piles that were or the piles that were placed in the ground that which was still in perfect condition because they were still wet the water table in Berlin is incredibly high so but it's in construction and will open in 2015 it's okay yeah me the most interesting thing about this is your education from this what you feel about that if you understand me yeah of course no I I think there's two things one one is that I think we underestimate people's the potential emotional relationship people have to buildings you know I think there's a profession we've we've isolated ourselves in dialog I mean I don't think we have a healthy dialogue with us in a way what we might call an audience although I don't think I've detected a performance I don't think you can really have an audience but with people who have to accept our work I think the the discussion that we have is sometimes shockingly crude from both sides and certainly in England that means it's appalling I mean if you sit in the planning you know hearing you just it's just shocking and and and I think we are we're part of the fault as well I mean I don't think we're I don't think we can just blame it on an ignorant public I think we have somehow lost an ability to discuss what I really appreciated more than anything else my experience in Berlin was a discussion and the discussion not only within the walls of which was was you know nearly sort of university type debate but also outside and at times its violent I mean this times it was really uncomfortable I mean I have no I've been in a room you know really trying to look for a back door being heckled and shouted at so there was an extraordinary motion but I think in a way it forced me to continuously through that ten years explain the project and in a way sharpen up I mean in the way you know you know when you say something that's sort of dodgy and you go home and rehearse it a bit more you know you you think more you know you if someone asks you a difficult question you you fend it off but it keeps you awake at night you know and you think that wasn't so stupid actually and also I don't think one should underestimate prejudice I don't think one should underestimate prejudice and emotion you know I don't you know we found ourselves again in this project continuously discussing that relationship between you know what's right rationally and what's right and emotionally and that was a very interesting pose so you know I found that very important I think that there is no way we could have done this project unless we took everybody with us so it was an incredibly it was an incredible exercise in you know team teamwork but from everybody I mean there's there's half a dozen people there's more than that this there's a dozen people from sort of senior level you know the head of the building department in Berlin the general director the the new general director the president of the shifting they can all take you around this building and explain it as well as I can you know they they feel part of it as much as I do and I think that was fundamental because you you can't discuss those things you can't get into those conversations if there's a sort of confrontation only if there's an intellectual I mean you can't have an intellectual confrontation if most of the time you're you're in another type of confrontation so that was the other thing that I think I took from it and I think thirdly the the the power of physical things I mean it was very you know we had no idea what the third in public would finally say because the the lobbying against it had been so strong I was sort of suspicious that you know like all of these things that the negative voices are louder than you were but you know the first day was open and the soft the soft opening and I sort of slipped in with a sort of heavy overcoat with my stomach churning you know really physically nearly sick with nervousness and it was extraordinary to see people um you know sort of touching things and sort of leading down and touching physical surfaces and I think that modern architecture has somehow you know we have lost for lots of reasons I mean not just on but you know through the construction process route lots of reasons everything conspires against materiality against craft against you know the physical and I think you know I do to be honest you know we've benefited on this project now I mean I don't think this is a great piece of architecture I think what this is a great idea and it's since it has a certain intensity created by its conditions and I think we just we we probably made some you know I think we set off for the right things I think like all things it's flawed I mean I I would do lots of things differently next time around but I do think that the the fact that it somehow seems to find a relationship and if people find a relationship with it with it I think is to do with something as simple as that the the physical and tactile qualities of it which we struggle with in modern architecture and in the process of building modern buildings to achieve No to replace the areas where you had simply suppressed the damage well we were in discussion for nearly a year with Ansem keifa who wanted and probably was the only German artist that could have replaced the Kalbach frescoes and he was desperately keen to do it and and of course it would have it would have been an extraordinary thing to have keifa do this but I was really nervous that this building is already so much about destruction and I was trying to make it into an optimistic building and again I think part of the reason that the German public so reacted positive is that they thought it was going to be a gloomy you know ruined and actually I think it's quite pretty you know it's actually quite a sort of a pretty place and I was slightly worried I mean I was flattered that Kiefer wanted to do it but I was slightly worried that he would just bring in this song burr you know another voice of destruction I mean he promised me that he would use a lot of blue as I sort of you know trying to reassure me that it wouldn't be a sort of really heavy Kiefer it would be a sort of happy Kieffer but I wasn't convinced that that Japan but no we did discuss we we did discuss it and in fact the the discussion of the Eric town but the climax of the staircase was was a discussion again for a year where we where we mocked up full-scale alternatives about how we might either copy the original or put a reduced version or even the contemporary version in the end we decided that we'd leave that for the next generation to discuss all too often the relationship between historic preservation and new construction can be described like that of a marriage in a country where our divorce isn't permitted and in in this presentation you began by discussing the upcoming debate on the rebuilding of the building that used to be the schloss of berlin more generally I like to ask question what do you think that your experience is with the newest museum can offer for making that debate successful given the fact that that's completely destroyed building and more generally how might this experience we defined the relationship between the two aspects of architecture rebuilding a new building um I'm sorry to say as far as the schloss is concerned is today and there is no debate there's never been a debate and that's one of the problems the the decision to knock down the the Palace of Republic was a a sly and surreptitious political decision camouflaged by the technical requirement to take out asbestos you know I mean if if the National Gallery if Mises National Gallery had asbestos you wouldn't take it you wouldn't destroy the building you just find a way of taking asbestos out in any way you can't lock the building down with asbestos and you've got to take the asbestos out for it we don't so it was nonsense it was a smokescreen and it was that was a political decision without debate the decision to rebuild it was a decision without debate and so you know you know as much as I I praise and I do I must say I've I've had the most extraordinary expense I I really enjoy the debate in in Germany generally I think that this a society that does articulate itself very well and whether that's about nuclear power or Iraq or well I mean that the discussion in the newspapers I think is a is conducted in a very reflective and in a way I can't think of another society that is so reflective you know we and we know why but the particular issue of the Schloss was so emotionally loaded and it was it was in the hands of a generation that a number of figures that just and strangely the person that really pushed it that was an old East German person something he pushed it through through Parliament by a couple of votes and it's it's a juggernaut difficult to stop now and I sat on the jury and I was seduced onto the jury as a way of trying to you know be another voice but it was it was the most depressing experience cuz normally in Germany that the debate is great you know you everyone has if anyone goes red in the face and shouts at each other and stamps her feet and you know and then this there was nothing it was it was a political it was being done behind us so it was very negative about it and I think one of the things it's a shame I think the the the current president of the shiftin part singer is is is the person that could deliver an interesting cultural project there I think he's a rather special you know we were fortunate meant having an extraordinary president of the shiftin that there was a for instance in in the discussion of the building there was no discussion of that program was absolutely no discussion I mean all number of people wanted including politicians was they wanted the four or they wanted three baroque facades back and and so it's a shame I mean I think it's it got stopped for a number of years and and it but the planning is is being completed so and I'm not sure it will and I'm fairly convinced it will carry on and no one has great you know no one's particularly convinced David in what language did you conduct these discussions in little Germany there's a familiar face in English and and a lot of people said that that was you know part of the success of the negotiation but um you know first of all I don't think a German could have done you know could have done this project I think it would have been difficult for a number of reasons and I think you know coming from outside I think it was useful and then I think conducting the whole thing in English this would have slowed everything down and and I sort of put you know at an anglo-saxon pragmatic pace and it's a reasonableness I mean I you know it was like Kosovo when we arrived I mean there were there were they they weren't you know the different factions were not talking to each other there was hate in the air the previous general director had annoyed everybody especially through his his performance with Georgia brassy and he wanted Frank earring I mean it was transparent and and everything he did was was in an attempt to get Frank Gehry to do the project and he was he was not he was not you know a negotiator and you know so we inherited a really horrible situation at the beginning and and I think the fact that we just got everybody to understand each other's points of view was was was our achievement and then to bring everybody together I think that was and it was you know I mean speaking English in Berlin it's okay that just amazing we make they embarrass us with their ability to me speaking English but I think it was you know I think I think it was quite you know I think 80% of my tasks on this project was diplomatic and 20% was architectural drink I think we have the permission to have two drinks want us to David of course in one is to fall and in some ways it's just obvious that he would have loved this

Channel: Columbia GSAPP

Views: 18,748

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: Planning And Preservation

Id: RfizDUjvomA

Length: 108min 50sec (6530 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2012