Get the best of Domus straight to your inbox!

Sticks and Stones

For his installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie, David Chipperfield starts from traditional founding elements: the trunks supporting the artifice of the Vitruvian hut and stone from the ground.

After descending from the U-Bahn, the yellow train that runs through Berlin, at Potsdamer Platz, it is impossible not to walk with eyes, chin and head pointed upwards.

It is a journey back in time that speaks of a modernity heralded elsewhere but not very far away. At the point where the Wall used to divide East and West, Helmut Jahn’s Sony Center illuminates the evening steps of all those passing beneath the Kollhoff-Tower, Piano Hochhaus and Bahn-Tower and heading towards the Kulturforum, the oh-so-bright colours not yet revealing its presence as they accompany the traffic to the city’s cultural arena.

“David Chipperfield – Sticks and Stones”, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlino. Photo Erika Pisa

It is evening and – peeking stunningly out from vegetation that impedes the gaze – the great gilded casing of the Philarmonie is a disobedient descendant of the right angle and, together with the Neue Staatsbibliothek across the road, envelops the modern temple designed by Mies van der Rohe. The Neue Nationalgalerie looks all around it, establishing a hierarchy with its clearly defined and calculated thicknesses that give the measure of all around them.

An image of Paestum appears, as Francesco Venezia portrayed it placing the Temple of Neptune and the Basilica, eternal and perennially universal works, beside the Berlin Gallery during the conference on Lafayette Park in Detroit in 2010. Up the steps and a crowd enlivens the space outside, reflected in the transparent Nationalgalerie construction that allows the space to flow from inside out.

Glass is explicit, leaving no room for thought and the forest constructed inside is certainly artificial, extremely architectural. After entering, the space is complicated by 144 trunks that, by generating new shadows, always seem to be concealing something.

The signs outside say “David Chipperfield – Sticks and Stones” and indicate that, 50 years on, the museum built to drawings by Mies Van der Rohe must bow to a new intervention by Chipperfield, who with this exhibition tries to construct a process by starting with things that concern architecture.

The crowd looks all around and the trunks interrupt the regularity in the central space, creating an imaginary boundary that no visitor attempts to cross. A light channels the gaze towards it: a brief introduction, thanks and the curator of the exhibition presents his concept: with “Sticks and stones [may break my bones, but words will never hurt me]”, David Chipperfield is referring to a nursery rhyme that in itself conjures up significant images for the purposes of the narration.

Wood and stone are considered primordial materials, part of the construction base of every culture because found everywhere and then combined to suit the morphology of their particular context. Elementary materials for a classical building but also for a fresh beginning that declares no desire to ever deny its relationship with past experiences. The modernity of the museum has not failed to remember the Sankt Matthäi-Kirche, a Neo-Romanesque church built in 1845 by Friedrich August Stülernor, or its contemporary nature as stated in the intentions of the exhibition recently opened by the British architect.

Chipperfield starts from traditional founding elements, the trunks supporting the artifice of the Vitruvian primitive hut cited by Marc-Antoine Laugier in his Essay on Architecture and stone from the ground on which everything happens, a theoretical prelude to that expressed by the eight elements supporting the roof, essential and basic.

The exhibition will be open until the end of December, when the gallery is scheduled to close for a few years, giving some works an opportunity to find their proper place in other Berlin museums. Udo Kittelmann, the German curator and current director of the Nationalgalerie Berlin, explains the need to upgrade the exhibition space, which has so far only managed to display a third of the collection of modern and contemporary art available to it.

The gallery in question risks probable inaccuracy when declaring the start of a new life since a never ambiguous order, as described by Pica, permits only repairs to the signs of passing time. Chipperfield limits the extent of his task in a responsible definition, as seen in the title “Sticks and Stones, An Intervention”, with due consideration for the difficult task of coping with the fragile balance that lies in elementary things, those least open to variables.

Until 31.12.2014
David Chipperfield: Sticks and Stones
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Get the best of Domus straight to your inbox!

Sticks and Stones

For his installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie, David Chipperfield starts from traditional founding elements: the trunks supporting the artifice of the Vitruvian hut and stone from the ground.

Latest on Architecture

Latest on Domus