BRITISH ARCHITECT Sir David Chipperfield has won Europe’s premier architecture award for his sensational renovation of the mid- 19th-century Neues Museum in Berlin, which had been severely damaged by British bombs during the second World War.
He was presented with the Mies van der Rohe award at a ceremony in Barcelona last night after beating stiff competition from Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi Museum in Rome, Bernard Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum in Athens and Jean Nouvel’s Concert House in Copenhagen.
The prestigious prize, which is sponsored by the European Commission, was awarded by a jury that included Yvonne Farrell of Dublin-based Grafton Architects, which won the World Building of the Year award in 2008 for its Bocconi University building in Milan.
Launched in 1987 and co-funded by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, the €60,000 prize is awarded biennially for works completed within the previous two years. The Berlin project was finished in 2009 and was hailed as a triumph, even by Angela Merkel.
Chipperfield was confronted with a difficult problem when he was commissioned to restore the Neues Museum in 1997, as the original building had been badly damaged during the war. His approach was also controversial, provoking opposition from historical purists.
Instead of replicating what was lost, he rebuilt the missing wing in a stripped-down style, left damaged 19th-century painted walls as he found them, retained all the evidence of multiple bullet holes and made new interventions in an unapologetically modernist style.
These included a dramatic grand staircase in polished concrete rich in aggregate; a covered courtyard for showing sculptures; and a free-standing concrete structure for more exhibition spaces.
All around is the “archaeology” of the old museum, in all its war-ravaged state. This is what so annoyed the purists; they wanted the museum fully restored, suggesting that having been wrecked by the RAF, it was being wrecked again by a British architect.
Chipperfield’s architectural achievement – which cost €290 million – is widely admired by the public, even if his plan to link the museums on Berlin’s Museum Island has yet to be implemented and the Neues Museum is still partly obscured by construction works.
