Discussion: Masterly Surfaces: David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin
Vestiges of exuberant ornament of painstakingly revealed murals and colourful floor mosaics, alternating with patches of plaster and exposed brickwork, the crumbling ceilings containing ceramic pots whose deterioration has been arrested and conserved – and situated between them, new interventions, archaic-seeming in their rigour, of prefabricated elements in white concrete, some of them sensually unrefined, others polished or in mirror glass: At the recently completed overhaul of the Neues Museum in Berlin, David Chipperfield demonstrates both a masterly and unprecedented staging of materiality per se, and of finishes in their different dispositions – producing a veritable deluge of images and impressions, but also unique in its approach to historic structures. Chipperfield and his team decided not to attempt to restore the former grandeur with a reconstruction true to the original, but to incorporate the remnants of the building, in accordance with the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (a stance currently unpopular in Berlin), in a “complementary restoration”. This March a ceremony was held – in which the keys to the museum were handed over to the society which operates it – to mark the completion of one of Germany’s most controversial and fascinating building sites. In the coming months, the collection will be mounted, and the Neues Museum will be reopened – the third building on the Museum Island to be completely renovated.
