Kulturforum, Berlin
2015 (Competition)

Competition entry for Berlin’s Museum of 20th Century Art to be located in the Kulturforum district. The project proposes a series of pavilions, public spaces and gardens connected and unified by a greenhouse structure. Serving both a symbolic and functional purpose, our project conceives this public building as a space that one could see through and into, creating a new kind of public space where 20th Century Art’s fascination with the abstract is met with the elements of nature and the figures of the city.

Our proposal for Berlin’s Museum for 20th Century Art seeks to fulfill the vision of art as a spiritual-culture center for civic society –a place of artistic expression with a social commitment to actively partake in the city’ s public life.

The museum programs are organized into ‘extroverted’ spaces or parts of the museum programs that can interact and engage with the city and ‘introverted’ spaces -- such as exhibition halls protected from urban disturbances. The ‘introverted’ exhibition spaces occupy the underground level and are organized in a chronological loop that extends fluidly into to Neue National Gallery space. In contrast the more interactive extroverted programs (café, shop, media & education center, temporary exhibitions, etc) are conceived as individual pavilions engaging in different ways with the surrounding urban context.

Carefully located on the site, these programed pavilions establish a dialogue with the existing Kulturforum district through a series of intimate open and enclosed public spaces that make for a more walkable and human scale experience for meeting and dialogue.

A large glass structure connects the programed pavilions into a single building, creating a unified greenhouse which contains enclosed public spaces: gardens and meeting places as well as functioning as the museum’s foyer. Bringing nature, light, reflections and beauty into the interior, the shape of the structure responds to intimate and large spaces that support and enhance the museum’s programs.

Modernity’s promise to infuse technology and nature, art and community is ever more the aspiration of a 21st century approach to urbanism and landscape. Alles of trees, gardens and plazas introduce intermediate scale interior and exterior landscapes between the picturesque beauty of the Tiergarten and the experience of the arcaded streets of Potsdamerplatz.

Serving both a symbolic and functional purpose, our project conceives this public building as a space that one could see through and into; a building that reveals the surrounding urban landscape but also contains it. Utilizing advanced technology in glass and a micro-climate strategy, the projects seeks to create a new kind of public space where 20th Century Art’s fascination with the abstract is met with the elements of nature and the figures of the city.

with Susannah Drake - DLANDstudio (Landscape Architect)

Team: Benjamin Albrecht, Nick Jabs, Claudia Salvarani, Halina Steiner, Parker Sutton

Rendering: Javier Galindo

Collage Drawing: Benjamin Albrecht