Mies Award to Chipperfield

The twelfth awards ceremony of the Mies van der Rohe Award took place in Barcelona on June 20 coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initiation of the reconstruction of Mies' pavilion. The prize was awarded to the Neues Museum in Berlin David Chipperfield Architects in collaboration with Julian Harrap; and to Collage House in Girona by Ramon Bosch and Beth Capdeferro for the category Emerging Architects. Demolish, design, repair, remove, reconstruct, imitate, incorporate, add: these were the terms of the discussion between Ole Bouman, Yvonne Farrell, Tarald Lundevall, Pei Zhu and the other members of the jury that was presided over by Mohsen Mostafavi, moderator of these debates.

In the privileged context of Museum Island, David Chipperfield tackles the theme of ruins seen as still-living fragments from which the project takes shape. The new annexes are ably articulated with the existing volumes and create a system of fluid and continuous circulation. The architect's modern minimalism relates to the past avoiding any logic of contrast. The two layers that overlap, although clearly recognizable, are not separated but merge in the design of a building that wants to be perceived as a single gesture.

The Collage House by Ramon Bosh and Beth Capdeferro is an open source architecture in which all actors contributed their own knowledge, from the inhabitants to the workers and in which every era has left its mark. The resulting complexity was deeply absorbed by the architects and transferred onto the wall surfaces only partly covered by new interventions. The project, with its low-tech technologies, was realized through the reuse of materials accumulated over time on the site and combined to compose a new artificial landscape, in the attempt to reproduce the heterogeneity found in nature.

There is the intellectual reworking of the Neues Museum, which stands in natural continuity with the Stüler's nineteenth-century building, and the spontaneous gestural design of the Collage House in Girona that connects to the past in a tactile way through the colors of a highly material architecture. The two buildings are not designed through processes of pure invention; the design idea questions the past to find unexpected solutions in response to the needs of the present.