The Neue Nationalgalerie was Mies van der Rohe's last completed building — designed in 1965 and opened in 1968, three years before his death, in the Kulturforum district of West Berlin. The building is an argument about what architecture can do when it arrives at its most reduced form: a single-storey glass pavilion suspended from a steel roof, eight columns, no interior walls. The main hall is all glass and steel and sky — a space of absolute clarity that can be experienced as empty or full depending entirely on what it contains. The permanent collection of twentieth-century European art is housed below ground; the upper hall is for temporary exhibitions. The building underwent a ten-year restoration under David Chipperfield Architects, completed in 2021, which preserved Mies's details with the accuracy they demanded. The Kulturforum location places it alongside Scharoun's Philharmonie — two buildings of the same era that understood architecture's obligations differently and are better understood in dialogue than in isolation.
Kulturforum, Berlin, Germany