John Pardey reflects on Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie (1968) in Berlin – a temple to glass and steel that was the German architect’s realisation of ‘universal space’ and his swan song.
(Credit: A. Savin via Wikimedia Commons)
This article part a monthly series of short essays on some of the greatest buildings of the 20th Century. Read John Pardey’s introduction to the series here.
It is much better to have just one idea, and if the idea is clear, then you can fight for it. That is how you can get things done.”
— Mies van der Rohe
Between 1908 and 1912, three of the 20th century’s greatest architects – Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe – were working together in the Berlin office of Peter Behrens. They were all destined to move away from neoclassical styles after the First World War to pioneer the new architecture of Europe and while Corbusier and Gropius pursued open-plan, white, modernist, forms, Mies took a different route. His concerned industrial materials and structure, founded on a philosophy that echoed Thomas Aquinas who argued that “truth is the conformity of thing and intellect” and his search for truth in building was unparalleled in the 20th century.
Mies had found success in Germany in the years prior to World War Two following his modernist debut with a design for a glass skyscraper in 1922. By 1927 he was the director of the Weissenhofsiedlung, had completed the German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition in 1929 along with the elegant Tugendhat House in Brno in 1930. That same year he became director of the Bauhaus, but by 1937, with the Nazis making the institution’s running untenable, he reluctantly closed the school.
Mies had visited America in late 1938 and upon returning home, found himself roughly interrogated by the Gestapo who were sniffing around his associations with communists and Jews in the Bauhaus. He realised he could not stay any longer, so fled on a train to Rotterdam, then hopped on a steamer to New York (and showing his ruthless steak, leaving behind for good his wife and three daughters).
Across the Atlantic there were wealthy Americans lining up to give him work; Hitler, by contrast, had decided on a sentimental national architecture, aided by Adolf Speer, for Germany’s future, leaving Mies no hope of work.
In the land of opportunity Mies was appointed head of the architecture school at the newly formed Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago allowing him to design the new campus masterplan and many of its buildings. By 1944, he had become an American citizen, completing severance from his native Germany.
Mies’ career burgeoned and within 14 years he had redefined a new post-war modernism in the States with an array of work in and around Chicago: The Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings, the seminal Crown Hall building at IIT and a house for Edith Farnsworth just outside the city – the latter, albeit a troubled project, galvanising his reputation.
His fame arguably reached its zenith with the Seagram building in New York (1959). Mies occupied a small part of the site, located on Park Avenue, with a 38-storey glass and bronze skyscraper, building high and cleverly creating space for a piazza (much like Piano and Rogers many years later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris).
The Neue Nationalgalerie under construction in 1967. (Credit: Manfred Niermann via Wikimedia Commons)
From a physical perspective, Mies was a big man; a monolithic figure, taciturn and reticent in character and rarely seen without a fat cigar. He drank prodigiously and treated his women carelessly. By the time he got the commission back in Germany for the Neue Nationalgalerie he was 76 years old and in poor health – and was to visit the site only twice, the last time to see the roof lifted into position. He died from oesophageal cancer in 1969, a year after the building’s competition.
The museum’s design drew from his 1961 office block for the Bacardi empire in Mexico City where he was refining his concept of ‘universal space’ – clear-span steel structures – that he saw as a temple surrounded by colonnades on all sides.
The plan for the Nationalgalerie produced a glass-sided hall of 50.4 metres square. The hall was supported on two 8.4-metre-high columns on each side, leaving the corners free, supporting a pre-stressed grid of steel beams (a “lamella”) each 1.8 metres deep, that over-sailed all sides by 7.2 metres. The roof, a mammoth structure engineered by Frei Otto, was fabricated on the ground and hoisted into position by 24 synchronised hydraulic jacks over an eight hour period. To avoid the ‘visual sag’ that can occur with long spans (as the Greeks knew, so used entasis), the midpoints of each side of the roof were raised by 100mm. Despite the heavy lifting going on structurally, the gallery’s aesthetics contribute to this effort as well: the whole structure is painted black and appears to float, with the glass walls that trace its perimeter allowing you to look right through the building from the outside.
The gallery, a great temple to glass and steel, sits upon a granite-clad plinth, more than twice the size of the steel structure. (Credit: Raimund Spekking via Wikimedia Commons)
Mies’ main motif for the design was the cruciform – in the main plan, in the columns, even in the reading tables. The result was a hall with no columns. Gallerists later found much criticism of this as, despite it being a vast, beautiful space, it was in many ways the antithesis of an art gallery, with nowhere to hang artwork.
A stubborn man, Mies was clear that the space should be versatile and open. “It is such a huge hall that of course it means great difficulties for the exhibiting of art. I am fully aware of that,” he said. Time, however, has perhaps proved his approach right as today most galleries host temporary exhibitions, with this space working perfectly for that use.
There is in fact space for permanent exhibitions, too. Two staircases within the hall lead down to the gallery spaces laid out in a more conventional pattern for such shows, with this subterranean, functional space, also opening out to one side into a beautiful walled sculpture garden to the west.
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The Neue Nationalgalerie was a fitting swan song for Mies in his search for truth, universal space and values. It is in some ways an homage to Schinkel’s neoclassical Altes Museum (Old Museum) completed in 1828 on Museum Island, also in Berlin, but also a true palace of glass and steel; the Parthenon of the 20th century.
