New National Gallery Berlin
(5 votes, average: 4.20 out of 5)
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Location:
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Potsdamer Straße 58
Berlin
10785 Tiergarten
Germany
coordinates:
lat 52.5069084, long 13.3673573
Building names(s): New National Gallery Berlin
Architect/Designer:
Mies van der Rohe
architect website:
Other Information:
Completion date: 1968
Function:
Building Type/Function: Exhibition Buildingwebsite: www.smb.spk-berlin.de
hours:
Mon closed
Tue/Wed/Fri 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Thurs 10:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Sat/Sun 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Costs: depending on the exhibition (check website for details of current exhibitions)
guided tours: Public guided tours 3,00 Euro
TIP: Free admission is granted to all visitors on Thursdays four hours before regular closing
getting there:
The Neue Nationalgalerie is a few minutes’ walk from Potsdamer Platz, southwest along on Potsdamer Strasse.
To reach Potsdamer Platz by public transport, take:
U-Bahn U2
S-Bahn S1, S2, S25
Last modified: 22 May, 2009 | Suggested By LT
(4 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)
Neue Nationalgalerie at the Kulturforum is a museum for classical modern art in Berlin, with main focus on early the 20th century. It is part of the German National Gallery. The museum building and its sculpture garden were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened in 1968.
The collection features a number of unique highlights of modern 20th century art. Particularly well represented are Cubism, Expressionism, the Bauhaus and Surrealism. The collection owns masterpieces of artists like Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Barnett Newman.
Nearly all of the museum’s display space is located underground. The ground floor, which is the only floor above the surface, serves principally as a lobby and ticket sales area. Nevertheless, the lobby contains the most dramatic interior design in the museum: the walls of the museum are almost entirely glass, interrupted only with slim metal structural supports, and the white natural light transmitted through these walls reflects off the dark, highly polished floor. The ceiling, constructed as a grid of dark metal beams, is decorated with long lines of LCD displays by artist Jenny Holzer, which continuously scroll abstract patterns down their length.
The unusual natural illumination, coming from around and below the viewer rather than above, and the continuous suggestion of motion in the ceiling, combine to shock the viewer out of his or her usual way of seeing, perhaps preparing the audience to bring a fresh eye to the art housed below. Yet, at the same time, the simplicity and rigorously pure geometry of the space’s rectangular forms makes the design seem tranquil, rather than obtrusive. This careful balance is typical of Mies van der Rohe’s mature style.
Along with Mies’ much earlier German Pavilion in Barcelona, the Neue Nationalgalerie is considered one of the foremost examples of modernist structural abstraction.
Mies was uncompromising in his pursuit of this perfection. When the infinitely flexible space between the glass curtain walls of the New National Gallery turned out to be quite unfriendly for exhibiting art, Mies’ unapologetic response (albeit at the age of 81) was that
“It is such a huge hall that of course it means great difficulties for the exhibiting of art. I am fully aware of that. But it has such potential that I simply cannot take those difficulties into account.”
Mies also refused to go along with the New National gallery’s request to extend the underground part of the building to provide much-needed extra space, because the extension – though invisible because beneath the ground – would have compromised the perfect cubic proportions of the building.