David Chipperfield, Am Kupfergraben, Berlin. During a recent trip to Berlin, Germany, I made a point to revisit the Gallerie Am Kupfergraben (Berlin Mitte district), completed between 2003-2007 by British architect Sir David Chipperfield. This was not the first time that I had paid a visit to the building—both for the inside and outside architectural qualities. Disappointingly, the Gallery was closed the day of my visit this time.
But that really did not matter, as I came with the sole purpose of studying the upper exterior corner window where it meets the existing building; today home of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin School of Business and Economics. The architectural instance of adjacency between the old and the new has always left me in awe as only an architect with talent and a deep respect for the urban context can make such a seamless gesture between buildings of different periods.
Let me state that Gallerie Am Kupfergraben (named after the nearby canal) is for me not a polemical building, thus its appeal to me. In a modernist sense of the word polemical, the intervention is non-visionary. This is especially true as the gesture towards the neighboring buildings and dialogue with the context is atypical for a contemporary non-European intervention.
The new building embraces the idea of “The Architecture of the City” —i.e., Aldo Rossi—as representing a lineage towards a historical tradition of the city, and not one of a metropolis (i.e., a Großstadt in German developed by Ludwig Hilberseimer that “emphasizes safety and speed for pedestrians and vehicles, respectively”). These modern urban strategies died in the mid 1970s with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe apartment complex in St. Louis, Missouri.
What I admire in Chipperfield’s intervention in Berlin, is that at first glance it is anonymous, humble, discreet, and even ordinary within the stylistic banality of traditional form and material; however, it is a tour de force. The new intervention is exceptional because it is an architecture of continuity without self-referential garrulous geometries.
This humble strategy sadly reminds me of a concept developed in the 1980s by Stillman and Kollhof (architect Hans Kollhof was a colleague of mine at the ETH-Zürich), who rethought the making of the historic 19th century city and promoted a return to Berlin as a classical city of stone—an attitude also in direct opposition to the unworkable artwork of the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind. I mention sadly as those aesthetic values promoted by my Zürich colleague pushed classical traditionalism to an extreme; one unwilling to bring a fresh perspective to a Berlin of the past.
Generally, I am not in favor of any style, especially those nicknamed “retro-architecture.” Like the Shakers, I believe that “the thing made had to be precisely what it was supposed to be.” Gallerie Am Kupfergraben, with its use of solid traditional materials, might appear at first more classical due to the way the architect abstracts the classical language and brings a contemporary, almost pictorial dimension to the facade.
This blog will not describe the interior experience—one that left me ambivalent although the spaces were beautifully lit and well-proportioned for the sole purpose of exhibiting art—thus, I have provided plans for reference and appreciation. Nor will I discuss the urban form (key to a continuity of the metropolis) of Chipperfield’s intervention, with the exception of a brief description of the existing building with which he will be working. My focus is one of a particular instance in the design, namely the treatment of the upper window opening on Kupfergraben (Image 1).
Existing adjacent building
Image 2: Google Images -Site plans and location of the building. Center map facsimile of Berlin map 1940.
The lot and contiguous building of the Gallery is situated on an historic site; one that became famous because of the fierce battle that took place during the last days of World War 2 during the liberation of Berlin. Directly adjacent to the Museuminsel and the Lustgarten that houses a network of world renown museums, the Gallery’s strategic position is one of a corner lot that originally had three sides.
The original building was constructed from 1879 to 1882, when it was built to house Berlin’s tax offices, the seat of the ‘Administration of Direct Taxes’ belonging to the Prussian Ministry of Finance. The design was authored by Ludwig Giersberg, who mainly designed government buildings for the city of Berlin.
During the war, the southern corner of the lot was badly damaged (Image 3 middle). The neighborhood was under Soviet jurisdiction during the Cold War, and when the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) was created in 1949, many remaining buildings were uncared for or abandoned, patched up, or blown up to be cleared with no interest in improving the national well-being by rebuilding on that site.
This dramatic attitude was mainly due to funds earmarked to pay for war reparations, the lack of skilled manpower, and the lack of good will to improve the urban realm. Building anew was certainly easier in East Germany despite their being cash poor because living quarters were an immediate necessity for the city, in particular to give legitimacy in the formation of a new social identity for the DDR.
After World War 2, the removal of the third wing (Hinter dem Gießhaus) meant Chipperfield inherited an amputated building, leaving him with an empty site on which to complete the existing lot with an infill building. What remained on the site (prior to Chipperfield’s intervention) were two four-story sandstone facades in Italian Renaissance style mixed with simple Prussian functional design, the 19th century Neoclassical style in Berlin that was robust and imposing (Image 4 and 5). Of note, nearby are two of Schinkel’s most famous buildings, exemplary examples of Prussian architecture.
The remaining two facades are symmetrically organized around a vertical axis. While the one on Kupfergraben is more austere with a minimum of detailing, the facade on Dorotheenstraße is more classical in its overall treatment. Ascending from ground to top are decorative triangular and semi-circular arch pediments; round and square pilasters with Corinthian capitals; an entablature; window treatments; a prominent Florentine cornice. Along with an overscaled Roman style arched entrance, these are some of the features that define the north side façade.
These classical attributes must have been echoed on the missing façade on Hinter dem Gießhaus, and this for the following two reasons: the reminiscence of a square pilaster next to the new building indicating a possible similar treatment on the missing façade and the width of the Gallery on Kupfergraben, which seems to be identical to that on Dorotheenstraße (Image 6).
Eventually the existing building was renovated, accompanied by cleaning the outside façade while leaving the Battle-scarred exterior to “remain legible on its 1.200 m2 façade” mostly marks of projectile impacts that were mandated to be kept by the city’s State Office for preservation of historic monuments.
New intervention
In the early years of the 21st century, the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery (CFA) commissioned Chipperfield to relocate its premises in a new building closer to the Museum Insel, a neighborhood that was up and coming after the fall of the wall. The gallery at that time, was and remains, one of the leading galleries in Berlin.
However, for unknown reasons, in 2016 the owners decided to return to their original location in the western neighborhood of Berlin-Charlottenburg. In 2019, the building was renamed Haus Bastian -Zentrum für kulturelle Bildung (Haus Bastian -Center for Cultural Education) with a mission that “offers richly diverse possibilities for innovative educational work and outreach programs.”
From an architectural point of view, the building’s sculptural qualities are primarily reflected in its façades. They are created by subtracting large volumes that become immense openings that in a very subtle way, build on the stratifications of the adjacent facades. Untreated wood panels and sashes along glass panes occupy the overscaled cavities and give depth and reflect the immediate surroundings. The materiality of the building (salvaged brick masonry with slurry) lends its abstract presence and renewed meaning to the adjacent historic context. An elegant intervention that gives modernism letters of credential. What I mean by that, is that a just and appropriate approach to site, context, tectonics, materials and program, can be more than simply new and different.
Corner window
As stated earlier, the corner window is my most cherished moment of this project. Chipperfield had a task at hand in working next to a ‘monument’ that demanded an architectural response as to how to approach the historical value of the building without distorting or mimicking the existing one. The solution is a tour de force that was shouldered by an intellectual bravado. In particular, the placement of a large window (3rd and 4th floor) next to a pilaster on the existing building; a superb way to create continuity through a joint.
Chipperfield’s intervention at that specific moment has become nothing less than one of the most elegant moves that I have seen recently in architecture. My increased affection for Chipperfield’s treatment of the joint has grown, particularly as I have been critical of some of his work, notably the extension to the Kunsthaus in Zurich (2021), and at the San Michele cemetery in Venice (2007-2017), which I consider an insensitive brutalist intervention.
The singular presence of the existing pilaster seems to have been the impetus to introduce the joint that we see today. The opening to the interior stairwell (Image 1), a Mondrianesque inspired composition, relies on proportional relationships that not only give the new window a sense of repose between vertical and horizontal surfaces, but more importantly integrates the overall composition of the pilaster.
Case in point, and while a true façade would reveal more precisely the actual proportional systems, I could identify that the pilaster’s width is echoed to its left in the slim vertical wood panel, and this without the need to mimic its entire height. This is accomplished by anchoring the stairwell’s landing with a large horizontal window. I believe that to have created a full vertical element would have robbed the suggestive dimension of a pilaster and become a banal copy of the original.
This magnificent achievement of being a good neighbor relies on the exceptionality of the event being tamed by a simple joint on the first and second floor with the neighboring building.
Conclusion
I have countless times quoted Montesquieu’s definition of beauty: “The distinguishing feature of great beauty is that first it should surprise to an indifferent degree, which, continuing and then augmenting, is finally changed to wonder and admiration.” This intervention is a case study in modesty that unravels its beauty as one learns to observe.
Postscript
Since my first visit to the Gallerie am Kupfergraben, David Chipperfield has expanded his imprint to the Museum Insel through the commission of an entrance to the museum complex encompassing the Pergamon, Neues and Altes Museum, and the Bode Museum. I look forward to writing a blog on my impression of that next intervention, but at this time, I was thoroughly impressed by what I could already see during my visit.