Dig where you are

Dig where you are. Neues Museum, Berlin, in background.
For 10 euro I could purchase a time slot to visit the Neues Museum.
Bullet holes pock the window frames of Neues Museum, Berlin, both inside and out. The new staircase of the new Neues Museum in Berlin is a monumental reconstruction (in terrazo) of the old one which collapsed in the bombing during WWWII.


Since I did not have an appointment (with Bonos) last Sunday when I was in the area, I continued along the shores of the Spree to another architectural relic: the Neues Museum, designed in 1855 by Friedrich Stüler (who also designed the Swedish National Museum). Unlike Speer's bunker, Neues was not built to withstand explosives, and thus was ravaged not only by bombs but by seventy years of subsequent exposure to the elements. It has been closed since the beginning of the war and only recently (2009) reopened to the public. Ironically, the Eastern German government had just appropriated funds to restore the museum in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Thus it took several more years to reappropriate funds, and in 1997 David Chipperfield, an English architect, was commissioned to do the reconsruction.

Chipperfield was confronted by Goliath, a nearly impossible task fraught with supervision by authorities and storm fronts propogated by cultural and political stakeholders, as well as by the general public. He continued his task of sifting through layer after layer of material, reviving old techniques and developing new, to integrate and reconstruct from what he discovered in the process. (Strange how an essay appeared just this morning in a Swedish daily (DN) on the Neues.)

In rebuilding places to house art - Bonos or Neues - Berlin epitomizes the layer upon layer that connect history (cities where bombs have been dropped) with the facades of contemporary art and architecture. If a city reflects the time and space of life, then I might well choose postwar Berlin to reflect the kaleidoscope of my own...

tbc