emabromley
By the second week of October 2022, I had made my way from Denmark, via Austria to Berlin. I am slightly ashamed to say that the last visited Berlin was in 1988 when it was still part of East Berlin. At that time I was in my second year of my BA(hons) degree in Architecture at Kingston Polytechnic. We visited in the autumn with a small team of tutors lead by Jeremy Till and stayed only a few block away from Checkpoint Charlie. I remember that it was the strangest feeling knowing that I was able to walk through the Berlin Wall, and yet the people we visited in East Berlin could not.
One of the highlights of our architectural field trip was visiting the Neue Nationals Gallerie, designed by Mies Van der Rohe (1968). It sat in a very different context back then. I remember crossing through the checkpoint in our coach, with all the security searches that entailed, and being dropped off in on the road right outside, on a rather grey day. It was a glorious building even then, but the renovation by David Chipperfield Architects has put it back in its rightful place as one of the must see buildings of Berlin.
There are so many things I love about this building, it’s simplicity and elegance and how it keeps it’s secrets hidden from view, but on this visit I particularly adored how at light the structure of the underside of the roof is illuminated by the reflection of the lights off of the marble floor.
