Museum of Twentieth Century Art

The extension of the Neue Nationalgalerie is situated at the center of the Kulturforum; set among the philharmonie and library by Hans Scharoun, the museum by Mies van der Rohe, a church by Friedrich Stühler and a cluster of the painting, prints and drawings, and fine arts museums around a rectangular square. Within the loose urban configuration, implied by Scharoun’s concept of the ‘Stadtlandschaft’, the building seeks to offer a formal answer to its complex context, based on a series of pictorial considerations, alignments and roof heights and inclinations.

Kulturforum and Tiergarten: An all in-situ concrete framework forms the skeleton of the building; an agglomerative form constituted by a collection of large rectilinear boxes, supporting the stacked large exhibition halls, and the sensibly drawn perimeter structure, resulting into irregular shaped in-between spaces. These two interior spatial conditions and their respective moments of transition are fundamental to the museum’s internal logic, material character, lighting conditions, and the conception of visitors’ paths and curators’ narratives.