SQUARED

I ended my European vacation perfectly, in Berlin, with a visit to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neuer Pavillon at the Schloss Charlottenburg. This small villa, set a five-minute walk from the palace, was built for King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1824 as a private retreat. I had visited once before, more than twenty years ago, in the fall, and photographed its handsome neoclassial exterior against bare trees. The building has since been fully restored and reopened in 2011 as a museum devoted to Schinkel and his work.

The building has a nine-square plan, with a staircase at its center leading to a second floor. As one steps into the front vestibule this geometric order becomes perfectly clear. Each square is a single room and each room is generously proportioned, so that a group of three or four can sit inside comfortably. The interiors, which were restored to their original finishes, are surprisingly opulent. Each corner room has its own strong signature color scheme, with coordinating draperies and upholstery. One chamber is blood red, one sky blue, and one mint green. And each one is furnished with period-appropriate display cases, chairs and tables, in dark polished wood. (None of them are as refined as the chairs Schinkel himself designed, which are displayed in a gallery on the second floor.)

This supremely traditional building feels, somehow, coolly modern. Its nine-square organization provides logical structure and circulation while allowing each room to maintain its own identity, creating drama as one moves from one to the next. One is delighted to walk all the way around a floor and then once again. The building’s exterior, as taut as a drum, is cleanly organized, with high narrow openings that don’t disrupt the integrity of the single volume. This building, rigorous in plan and modest in its facades, opens up to generous accommodations. It’s a lesson in the richness and complexity possible within geometric restraint.

Photograph © Nalina Moses.

September 09, 2018 by Nalina Moses

July 14, 2011 by Nalina Moses

An American’s dreamy notions about European train travel are dispelled by Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, the city’s huge new central station completed in 2006. The great glass shed, just across the River Spree from the capitol buildings, is a nexus for both local and long distance lines. But it offers no public space. There’s no central hall, and the main entrance leads you right out into the street. (Landscaping, anyone?) The Hauptbahnhof is basically a bunch of train tracks running through a shopping mall.

On a very hot day I took refuge outside along the east side of building. There were cascading steps in the shade, and groups of locals were sitting, eating lunch and talking. From here I could look across the water and see the dome of the Reichstag floating in the distance. The first time I visited Berlin, fifteen years ago, the Reichstag was covered in scaffolding. Then the last time I visited Berlin, three years ago, I walked up Norman Foster’s great glass dome and wondered what precisely I was supposed to feel when I reached the top; it was an empty, pretty spectacle. From the vantage of these shady steps the Reichstag felt much more comfortable, and so did the train station.

July 13, 2011 by Nalina Moses

There’s a new temporary museum at the former site of Reich Main Security Office in Mitte, Berlin called Topography of Terrors, which documents the history of the organizations who used the site as a base of operations, including the Gestapo and the SS. It was at this location that the transports and concentration camps were organized, and enemies of the state were detained and tortured. The museum building (by architect Ursula Wilms) is, appropriately, a banal and chilling one, a flat glass ring layered with metal scrims that sits within fields of rubble-like gravel.

The exhibitions themselves are powerful, with lucid text and graphic photographs. But they’re the kind of materials that could be displayed at any holocaust memorial at any place in the world. When I visited, on a brilliant summer afternoon, there were crowds gathered inside, on the very ground where these atrocities originated. We wanted to know about the place itself. What was the building like? What were the detaining cells, the conference rooms, the bathrooms, like? What was the architecture of the regime, how did it empower those in charge, and how was it complicit in what happened?

July 12, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Does art always have to go deep? The Kohlhaas Curtain, the Frank Stella - Santiago Calatrava collaboration on view now at the New National Gallery in Berlin, makes me feel that it doesn’t. Big, bright and bold, the installation consists of nearly 100 linear feet of paintings on white tarp (by Stella) wrapped inside and outside a giant wire drum (by Calatrava) that’s suspended in the center of the glass-box gallery (by architect Mies van der Rohe).

The paintings might not be so compelling in themselves, but as displayed in the round like this they energize the gallery, drawing visitors forward while keeping the majestic panoramas along the edge of the building clear. The Curtain is installed at just the right height, so that guests can wander underneath and, for a few minutes, get lost inside. The artwork adds a welcome bit of funk to the archly elegant gallery. It pleases the eye, doesn’t get in the way, and doesn’t require too much thought. It’s the finest kind of decorator art.