Hansjörg Göritz Studio
< Chronicles
February 2016
Museum of the 20th Century Berlin -
Cultural Forum Unfolded
Ideals of [urban] landscape and [cultural] forum only materialize in spatial coherence. The site, with its solitary buildings lacks a spatially unifying element. A generous space designing gesture would tie together scattered structural elements and give the district its own unique big picture characteristic. Round off, cleaned up and cleared out, the patchwork of fragments becomes a palimpsest. A continuous forum surface turns into a canvas between, with and for all solitaires, including Potsdamer Strasse. In the center of orthogonal and polygonal urban edges - from the Tiergarten park to the canal - no additional monolith should occupy such possible integrity. Consequently this gained urban space expands over an upfolded roof and flows into its foyer, and down onto the interior continuous ramped landscape into the depths of his own identity of a museum with artificial light and daylight wells. This promenade architecturale becomes a forum - within the forum. Amidst this focus reconsidered arise connections such as from an urban loggia to and between the components of this multi-layered collage. Surrounded by neo-romanesque classicism and rationalist as well as expressive modernism, this museum will form an independent component representing a new century. Embedded within, it carries the potential for becoming a unique place in the spatial flow of this new overall composition of a clarified forum.