University of Washington - College of Built Environment
Architectural Design Studio - 10 weeks
Instructors: Nicole Huber, Wyn Bielaska
Year: 2017
Under the working title NATIONALGALERY20, the studio will develop a museum for 20th-century art housing Avant-Garde art from the 1920ies, of Pop Art with, amongst others, works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, as well as collections of contemporary art. In this outline, it follows the idea competition launched by Berlin’s Foundation of Prussian Cultural Heritage, an organization responsible for Berlin’s State Museums, Libraries, and Archives in 2015.
The building site is at the center of Berlin’s “Cultural Forum” surrounded by the famous Philharmonic and State Library by Hans Scharoun, the iconic New National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe, the city’s Gallery of Paintings and the Museum of Arts and Crafts. The Cultural Forum is close to the Potsdamer Platz which was part of the death strip until the wall came down in 1989 and is now a conglomeration of shopping malls and office buildings by architects such as Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Arata Isozaki, and Helmut Jahn, a center for consumption, entertainment, and media where also Berlin’s yearly film festival, the Berlinale, takes place.
According to the call for proposals, the museum is to become a place of “information, irritation, and interaction,” mirroring and responding to the ruptured and contradictory history of the 20th century characterized by two world wars and the Holocaust, the cold war, the fall of the iron curtain and German Unification.
