The public opening event for this long-awaited exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin will take place on 1 October at 20:00. The Neue Nationalgalerie was built by Mies van der Rohe and is dedicated to the art of the 20th century.

The trees, spruce trees originally from Europe and Sitka spruces native to North America, come from a private forest on the Baltic Sea in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where they were planted 100 years ago as a forestry experiment. They are now being replaced gradually with deciduous trees to promote the conversion into a mixed forest.

Architect David Chipperfield among tree trunks in his installation "Sticks and Stones" at the Neue Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, Germany. The piece, which includes 144 tree trunks harvested from a forest near the Baltic Sea, precedes the closure of the museum for a renovation that will be led by Chipperfield.

Description of the project by David Chipperfield Architects, Berlin

Using 144 imposing tree trunks, British architect David Chipperfield (b. in 1953) transforms the open glass hall of the museum into a densely filled hall of columns for a three-month period. The installation Sticks and Stones engages with the architecture of the Neue Nationalgalerie and simultaneously serves as a prologue to the upcoming overall renovation of the museum that David Chipperfield Architects will undertake starting in 2015.

For the title of his intervention, David Chipperfield borrowed the catchy beginning of an English children’s rhyme: “Sticks and stones [may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.]” In so doing, he points to two elements of Neue Nationalgalerie and architecture in general: columns and stone. As light-hearted as the title might seem, this last special exhibition before the closing of the institution for several years is also quite profound in its meaning.

With Sticks and Stones, Chipperfield directs attention back to the spectacular construction of the museum, erected in the years 1965 to 1968 according to the plans of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). Eight narrow steel supports bear the weight of the monumental roof that seems to hover freely in the air because the supports are located far from the roof corners. The two pillar-like marble-covered installation structures inside the glass hall have no supporting function.

Like a provisional construction, the 144 barked spruce tree trunks, each ca. eight meters in length, symbolically support the weight of the roof. They fit into the clear pattern shaped by the steel roof, the granite floor, and the overall proportions of the Neue Nationalgalerie. In this way, Chipperfield’s installation allows for a new experience of space within the modernist rigor of the Mies van der Rohe design. Sticks and Stones thus pays homage to the great predecessor Mies van der Rohe while simultaneously serving as a metaphor for the upcoming construction site.

Openness and density, inside and outside, nature and technology: a field of associations is evoked that stretches far back into the history of world architecture and circles around the cultural history of the column – from the colonnades of ancient temples to the Mosque of Córdoba (8th–10th century) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s mushroom-shaped "lily pad" concrete columns in the Johnson Wax Building (1936–1939) to Chipperfield’s own building projects in the 21st century. David Chipperfield has made a name for himself not just with his prizewinning renovation and expansion of Berlin’s Neues Museum (1997–2009), and not in the German capital alone.

The column has been a leitmotif in his recent designs, such as the Literaturmuseum der Moderne, Marbach am Neckar (2002–2006) with its hall of slim concrete columns, or at the planned James-Simon-Galerie, the entrance building for Berlin’s Museumsinsel, with its colonnade (2007–2017), or recently at the office building One Pancras Square in London (2008–2013) with its 400 textile-patterned cast iron columns along the façade.

In the middle of the hall of supports, there is a “clearing,” a 200-square-meter space where various interdisciplinary events take place.

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Architects
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David Chipperfield Architects Berlin. Architects.- David Chipperfield & Alexander Schwarz.
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Design team
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Thomas Benk, Martin Reichert, Ute Zscharnt.
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Collaborators
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Spruce Trees.- François von Chappuis, Forst Hohen-Niendorf.
Installation.- Thomas Lucker (Restaurierung am Oberbaum).
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Dates
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October 2 to December 31, 2014. The public opening event for this long-awaited exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin will take place on 1 October at 20:00.
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Location
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Neue Nationalgalerie. Berlin, Germany.
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David Chipperfield was born in London in 1953 and studied architecture at the Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London before working at the practices of Douglas Stephen, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.

In 1985 he founded David Chipperfield Architects, which today has over 300 staff at its offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai.

David Chipperfield has taught and held conferences in Europe and the United States and has received honorary degrees from the universities of Kingston and Kent.

He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA). In 2009 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2010 he received a knighthood for services to architecture in the UK and Germany. In 2011 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture and in 2013 the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, while in 2021 he was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in recognition of a lifetime’s work.

In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aquisgran the 27th of Marz of 1886 and died in Chicago the 17th of August of 1969. He was active in Germany, from 1908 to 1938, when he moved to USA and where he was until his death. He was also considerate a “master” of the Modern Movement, since the 50s, and he was one of the fathers of this movement with Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mies van der Rohe, who in his childhood was guided by masters as Hendrik Petrus Berlage or Peter Behrens, he always kept tabs of the Villlet-Le-Duc’s rationalism or Karl Friedrich Schinkel eclectic classicism, having a strong connection with the architectural historicism. As he said in his manifesto “Baukunst und Zeiwille” about this: “it is not possible to move on looking back”.

In 1900 he began to work with his father in the stone workshop of the family and shortly afterward he move to Berlin to work with Bruno Paul in 1902, designing furniture. He planned his first house in 1907, the “Riehl House” in Neubabelsbers and worked from 1908 to 1911 in Peter Behrens’s studio. There he was influenced by structural technics and designs based on steel and glass, as the AEG project in Berlin. While he was in Behrens’s studio he designed the Perls House.

In 1912 he openned his own studio and projected a house in The Hague for Kröller-Müller marriage. The studio received few jobs in its first years, but Mies, contrary to architects as Le Corbusier, in his first years he already showed an architectural policy to follow, being an architect that changed little his architectural philosophy. To his epoch belonged the Heertrasse House and Urbig House as his principal projects.

In 1913 se move to the outskirts of Berlin with his wife Ada Bruhn with whom he would have three kids. The family broke up when Mies was posted to Romania during the World War I.

In 1920, Ludwig Mies changed his surname to Mies van der Rohe and in 1922 he joined as member to the “Novembergruppe”. One year later, in 1923, he published the magazine “G” with Doesburg Lisstzky and Rechter. During this period he worked in two houses, the Birck House and the Mosler House. In 1926, Mies van der Rohe held the post of chief commissioner of the German Werkbund exhibition, being his president this year. In this period he projected the Wolf House in Guden and the Hermann Lange House in Krefeld and in 1927, he met the designer Lilly Reich, in the house exhibition of Weissenhof, where he was director, and he planned a steel structure block for her.

In 1929, he received the project the German National Pavilion to the International Exhibition of Barcelona) rebuilt in 1986=, where he included the design of the famous Barcelona Chair.

In 1930, he planned in Brün – present Czech Republic -, the Tugendhat Villa. He managed the Dessau’s Bauhaus until his closure in 1933. The Nazism forced Mies to emigrate to the United States in 1937. He was designated chair of the Architecture department in Armour Institute in 1938, the one that later merged with the Lewis Institute, forming the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and where he took the responsibility to build a considerable extent of the foundations of the Intitute from 1939 and 1958. One of the buildings of this complex is the Crown Hall, IIT (1950-1956).

In 1940, he met the person who would be his partner until his death, Lora Marx. He became citizen of the USA in 1944 and, one year later, he began with the Farnsworth House’s project (1945-1950). During this stage, in 1948, he designed his first skyscraper: the two towers of the Lake Drive Apartments in Chicago, which were finished in 1951. Shortly after, he planned other building of this typology, the Commonwealth Promenade Apartments, from 1953 to 1956.

In 1958 he projected his most important work: the Segram Building in New York. This building has 37 storeys, covered with glass and bronze, which built and planned with Philip Johnson. He retired from the Illinois Institute of Technology the same year. He also built more towers and complexes as: the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963-1969) and the Westmount Square (1965-1968) and designed the New Square and Office Tower of The City of London (1967).

From 1962 to 1968, he built the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which would be his last legacy to the architecture. The building that rose as exhibition hall is made of steel, glass and granite.

He died in Chicago the 17th of August if 1969 leaving behind a large legacy and influence to next generations.

The Mies van der Rohe’s most famous sentences are “Less is more” and “God is in the details”.
 

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