/ARTS WEEKLY/GERMANY: Berlin Gets Chinese Touch

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Jun 3 2003 (IPS) - Nimble in his movement, and quick in his mind at the age of 86, Chinese-born Ieoh Ming Pei, one of the world’s greatest architects, grins as former German chancellor Helmut Kohl clasps both Pei’s hands warmly. "Fantastic!" says Kohl. "It’s a wonderful building. All my hopes have been fulfilled."

The building is the latest architectural jewel on the Berlin cultural landscape – the new exhibition halls designed by the New York-based Pei in the German Historical Museum, on the stately Unten den Linden boulevard.

It was not easy turning a small, awkward plot of land into an attractive place between the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse), the Altes Museum (Old Museum) and the Armoury, the only surviving Baroque building in Berlin.

The exhibition halls built at a cost of 54 million U.S. dollars were formally opened in the presence of the dapper Pei and a host of other guests, including German housing minister Manfred Stolpe, Berlin’s governing mayor Klaus Wowereit, and Kohl, who had approved the project almost a decade ago.

The exhibition halls opened with the opening also of a major exhibition ‘Idea Europe, Designs for Eternal Peace’, presenting Europe’s lengthy history of cultural diversity. Artefacts contributed by a host of countries are included in the exhibition.

Separately, on the upper floors of the new building, I M Pei’s architectural designs, plans and models, and photographs and films linked to his long career are displayed.

The new exhibition halls are a dazzling mixture of glass, steel and stone. Pei had thought of the historic surroundings when he was designing the building. "But you know I cannot reproduce something that is neo-classic," Pei told IPS. "We live in the 21st century. It has to be modern."

At the same time one has to be respectful of the past. By making the work transparent, there’s no clash of style. In that way I pay respect to the past but at the same time say we are of the 21st century."

Transparency, movement and light are the weapons Pei uses to forge the building into a public place. Movement inside the building becomes visible through its glass front, as in a picture window.

Once inside the Museum, visitors get to see the north front of the Armoury, framed by a glass hall. The spiral staircase of the tower, rising out of the glass hall, makes visitors aware of its historic setting.

By roofing over the historic Schlueterhof (courtyard), additional Museum space is created that can be used all year round. In doing so, Pei creates a link with the post-1880 state of the building, when the northern part of the Armoury was remodelled after the Franco-Prussian War to create "a hall of fame".

As a "home" for special exhibitions, the Museum offers an ideal spot to establish perspectives and visual links between present and past.

"With its reductive minimalism of materials and monochrome surfaces, it is condensed into a monolith shape that reacts to light and shadow like a monumental stone sculpture," says Professor Hans Ottomeyer, the German Historical Museum director.

Back in 1988 it was planned for the German Historical Museum to be built by the Milanese architect Aldo Rossi on a plot of land near a bend of the River Spree, today the location of the Federal Chancellery Offices. It would have featured a colonnade, tower, basilica and rotunda as a connected museum landscape.

But after the dramatic collapse of the communist empire, and the subsequent unification of Germany, with the decision to move the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin, Rossi’s chances of realising his project vanished.

Scaling down the proposals to the space available in the Armoury complex became unavoidable. That is where Pei came in.

Christoph Stoelzl, then director of the Museum, recalls Jobst Siedler, the doyen among German architectural critics, lamenting the weaknesses of the unchecked building boom in the city centre. How much better and dignified the "new Berlin" would look if some of the great classic architects of the century such as Pei had been allowed to "add their bit", he said.

The problem was Pei only took on work he had chosen himelf. Stoelzl flew to New York to see him at his studio at 600 Madison Avenue, and spent hours laying the foundation for the Chinese-born visionary’s involvement with Berlin.

"When l stepped out into the fiery heat of Manhattan that afternoon, I knew instinctively that my dream would come true," Stoelzl said. "Pei builds where he thinks necessary – the seed was sown."

In the catalogue ‘I M Pei – The Exhibitions Building of the German Historical Museum Berlin’, Stoelzl writes: "Wandering through the centre of Berlin on foot, he (Pei) ran his analytical dividers round the Armoury (Zeughaus). And discovered that the future building site lay symbolically enough between the two Schinkels’, the great Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) and the Altes Museum (Old Museum) buildings.

Pei later went to see Helmut Kohl in Bonn. The two men could hardly be more different. "On the one hand," writes Stoelzl, "the sturdy unifier of Germany who spent days in the intricacies of power politics, on the other the fragile creator of immaculate constructions the world over.

"The conversation ebbed to and fro over Mitterrand, Paris, the role of capitals and the role of culture in world politics," says Stoelzl. "Finally, the chancellor suddenly opened a drawer, revealing a disc-player inside. The sounds of a Mozart divertimento rang out. It was a strange, unreal scene, the conversation died. My sense was that the two men were in accord, past words."

During a long career, Pei has built town halls and concert halls, a church, an airport, a few million square feet of office space, even council housing. But it is as a designer of museums – he’s built more than a dozen – that his fame has grown.

The East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington which was completed in 1978, and the large-scale remodelling of the Louvre, which took place from 1983 to 1993, are notable among them.