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German commission for David Chipperfield in New York

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The New National Gallery in Berlin. © Fabian Sommer/dpa

David Chipperfield has just renovated the iconic Mies building of the New National Gallery in Berlin. Now “Germany’s most expensive haunted castle” is waiting for him in New York.

Berlin/New York – David Chipperfield has not even seen his latest masterpiece.

While experts and first visitors are already looking for new words of enthusiasm, the British star architect will only take a look at the completely renovated New National Gallery on this opening weekend due to the corona situation.

For five years, he and his team restored the iconic building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) to its original state using state-of-the-art means. The next order from Germany is already waiting for him. Chipperfield wakes the former Goethe House, a representative palace in Manhattan, from its slumber for the Federal Foreign Office for 20 million euros.

In New York, too, Chipperfield wants to be careful with historical substance again. “We always try not to simply pursue a formal idea. Design is not an end in itself. Design is a tool that makes things possible,” says Chipperfield of the German Press Agency in Berlin. “In the case of the New National Gallery, it wasn’t about bringing Chipperfield’s signature to the project, but about bringing the building back to itself.” It’s similar in New York. “We don’t want to realize an architectural project with wonderful rooms, facades or something like that. It’s about opening up the possibilities of the object with the existing building and its goals, so that the two come together better.”

The six-story Beaux-Arts-style building with a light gray facade and green copper roof stands on Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan across from the Metropolitan Museum. West Germany bought it in 1955 from James Gerard, a former US ambassador to Germany. The representative building in a prime location on the Upper East Side served as the headquarters of the Goethe Institute in New York for a long time. It is currently a “Place for Ideas” called “1014” after the number on 5th Avenue.

Former Goethe House in New York
The former Goethe House in New York. © Christina Horsten/dpa

After the Goethe-Institut moved to southern Manhattan, there was a lack of convincing concepts. Expensive maintenance costs and fire protection regulations from Germany made the building, which had hardly been used for a long time, into “Germany’s most expensive haunted castle”.

Now a center for transatlantic encounters is to grow out of it. Everyone, from the then Chancellor Willy Brandt to the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, gave each other a hand. The Federal Foreign Office wants to build on this and involve other transatlantic players in New York.

“We need more and more opportunities for structured dialogue on issues that are important to us today. That has never been more necessary than now,” says Chipperfield. “An institution like this, organized to discuss ideas related to the way we live, problems we face, is a fantastic concept.”

In the future, scholarship holders and researchers will live and work in one place that will also serve as a meeting place and event location. “To be in a building used by scientists and occupied by intellectuals is much more fascinating than, for example, any room in a museum.” Chipperfield speaks of a “place of ideas”.

According to the design, the various activities in the house overlap. “It would be a shame if you walked into the building for a reception or a reading and didn’t notice that scholarship holders reside there,” explains Chipperfield. “We designed the building to be as open and friendly as possible and largely reduced the institutional facilities.” The place should not feel too formal. “So we created a series of slightly more complex spaces, so not just workspaces and conference rooms, but areas in the building where different levels of privacy or publicity can be created.”

David Chipperfield
British architect David Chipperfield (2019). © Christoph Soeder/dpa

For this purpose, the building gets a visible center. “With a lounge that extends over two floors, we are trying to create a place where the public and private world can meet.” According to Chipperfield, residents can then invite visitors here at any time. “This space opens up to the more informal opportunities, it’s meant to be a kind of bridge between the more institutional happenings and the less formal activities.”

This continues outside. “With the redesign of the garden, we want to create the situation of a typical New York townhouse: If you go out through the back door, you come into a very beautiful garden,” says Chipperfield, describing the plans. “So we created areas where people can meet casually, instead of just being at an event at a certain time and then going home.”

Chipperfield has already realized a lot in Berlin and New York. How are the two cities different? “In a way, there are perhaps no more special buildings in New York than in Berlin,” says the architect. “On the other hand, the whole city is a festival of architecture. New York is an architectural monument in itself, the concept of a city in its ultimate dimension.” dpa

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