Transparent and Archaic: Jacques Herzog on the Preliminary Design of the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts
11.10.2018Transparent and Archaic: Jacques Herzog on the Preliminary Design of the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts
Herzog & de Meuron, an architecture office in Basel, is designing the new Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts. Together with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, they are refining the design they submitted to the competition. In an interview, Jacques Herzog explains what needs to be considered when constructing a museum in the 21st century and why the design is ideal for the Kulturforum.
In October 2016, the design submitted by Herzog & de Meuron architectural office won the competition for the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (Museum of the 20th Century) to be located in the Kulturforum in Berlin with a building in an archetypal form and an open brick facade. In its interior, two boulevards intersect. Berlin loves nicknames, and a nickname for the building was not long in coming: it was casually called “the barn.” Since January 2018 and in close consultation with its future users, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin), Herzog & de Meuron have continued to develop their submission into a preliminary design. As the director of the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), Udo Kittelmann, put it on the day of the presentation: “The barn has turned into a museum. It will be one that can meet the demands of 21st-century museum visitors.” According to Kittelmann, those demands have changed dramatically in the past ten years. Nowadays a museum is also a place to meet, a place to debate in a democratic setting.
The new building will obviously have to meet some expectations – one of which is “healing” the Kulturforum, which is often described as being barren and a faceless place because of its fragmentation. For this reason, Herzog began his presentation of the preliminary design with the words: “Our urban planning concept for the Kulturforum is one of closeness and density, not emptiness.” After the podium discussion on October 9, 2019, he briefly explained what he meant and how to construct a museum for the 21st century.
Jacques Herzog on the new building for the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts
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Together with the Staatliche Museen, you developed the design further. What was this collaboration like in detail?
We want to satisfy the requirements of museum directors, curators, and artists. That is a major reason why we have built many museums all over the world: we love art and we are motivated by the wishes and requirements that emerge from this field. We aren’t architects who cobble something together and want to realize their own ideas that have nothing to do with the world of art. We greet clients who want to collaborate with open arms. So our dialogue has always been completely open. In the end, we all want the same thing: the museum directorship, in the role it is playing here, and the architect working together to achieve a common goal.
How do you build a museum for the 21st century?
Ever since museums have existed, there have only been good ones and bad ones. Museums that work for the art audience, visitors in general, and the art – and ones that don’t work as well. A museum – even one from the 18th century, if you just think of the Louvre, which was built as a royal palace and now functions as a museum – it works well for the art of those old masters. But it would work as a contemporary art gallery, too, because it’s a good building. You could show performance art there or films. In other words, I’m skeptical when people say that this is a museum for the 21st century and everything has to be different. But what is important – and you can see it here in Berlin – is that a museum is always perfect or not so perfect for a location, it works well or not so well there. And for this location we have an archaic form, the one we were able to present here…in my opinion, it was the only competition project that functioned in interplay with the abstraction of the Mies building and Scharoun’s organic compositions…this really ordinary shape – suddenly, wow! – it is so provocatively simple. And in that particular setting – now we are getting to museums for the 21st century – it was important to create transparency, which contradicts the archaic form to an extent. The large, hangar-like doors that work like walls also counteract the archaic aspect in a way. In other words, there is an element of ambivalence between one point and the other. Maybe that’s typical of our times; it wouldn’t have been possible to this extent when Mies and Scharoun were active or even earlier. It’s a contemporary element. But the building has aspects beyond it, aspects that are characteristic of this archaic form, particularly our design, which could even be two, three, or four hundred years old. I think that this is a very important aspect of the way we think architecture. Of course today and yesterday are completely different, but it doesn’t mean that something that existed earlier no longer works or has value. Instead, we humans have longings deep inside of us, I almost said – like Plato – that there are archetypal images that somehow always function over and over again. If you ask one of today’s children to draw a house, most children in the world would draw this typical house shape. This shows that such images do exist, and they can absolutely be used in and are suitable for the 21st century.
Does this new museum building “complete” the Kulturforum?
The Kulturforum, the idea of the forum is, as I attempted to say, a concept of closeness and density, meaning the closeness of buildings and of institutions. This density will create a type of forum, an exchange, a place of exchange between the stored knowledge of the library, the library’s memory, between the world of music in the Philharmonie and the church’s sacred and yet very contemporary program. A forum is not a hole surrounded by pillars, a space. Instead, it is a place for closeness. And between the buildings, between these objects, there are very specific outer spaces that are very different…people can live very different patterns of movement and forms of behavior in them.
© SPK / Gesine Bahr
Design views, fall 2019
Herzog & de Meuron
Herzog & de Meuron is a partnership run by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in which Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler, and Stefan Marbach are senior partners. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron established their office in Basel in 1978. The partnership has grown over the years. Herzog & de Meuron have offices in Basel, Hamburg, London, New York City, and Hong Kong.
The buildings that Herzog & de Meuron have designed and realized for cultural institutions include the Tate Gallery of Modern Art (2000) and its fabulous extension (2016) in London, Vitra Haus (2009) and the Vitra Schaudepot (2015) in Weil am Rhein, the extension and renovation of Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France (2015), the Museum der Kulturen in Basel (2010), and the Elbphilharmonie (2017) in Hamburg.
