The last of my posts from Berlin is a view of the James Simon Galerie under construction, another Chipperfield project, running immediately alongside the Neues Museum next to the river, which will provide a place of orientation for the Museum Island as a whole, named after the entrepreneur and collector who donated the bust of Nefertiti to the Berlin Museums:-
We ended our Berlin tour by visiting Ai Weiwei’s studio underneath Olafur Eliasson in the vaults of the brewery. We didn’t expect to see him, but did – surprisingly serene, away from the refugees, teaching at the university and looking after his son, whilst he prepares for an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi. He has accumulated large amounts of clothes from the refugee camps and there was a wonderful wickerwork man suspended from the ceiling:-
We spent the bulk of today thinking through, and talking about, the RA’s plans for 2018. We did it in the top floor of the offices of Sauerbruch Hutton, who are based in a late nineteenth-century building which was originally designed as part of the headquarters of the Prussian army in Moabit, a leafy area of Berlin with parade grounds which have been turned into sports facilities. The top floor was added recently and is beautifully open and spacious:-
In the evening, we went to the Boros Foundation, built during the early days of the war as a place of night-time shelter for the staff of the Friedrichstrasse station, used after the war by the red army for interrogation, then for the storage of bananas under the GDR, a techno night club during the 1990s. Sold to a property developer, it was converted by a young architect, Jens Caspar for the display of contemporary art:-
We went to visit David Chipperfield’s Berlin headquarters, originally a nineteenth-century factory in Mitte, now with modern additions, including Kanteen – somewhere for the public to eat as well as staff – and a courtyard space designed by Peter Wirtz:-
I was particularly impressed by the fragments of the old building, displayed in the original nineteenth-century desk cases:-
We went to the Neues Museum, Friedrich Stüler’s great classical building on the banks of the river Spree, bombed in the war and left semi-derelict until its reconstruction was announced in September 1989, just before the Wall came down. An international competition was then held in 1994. A second competition in 1997 was won jointly by David Chipperfield and Julian Harrap, working in combination and following the brief to retain as much as possible of the original building. We started looking at the exterior – the way that the new and the old are knitted together where the original building was bombed:-
We started at the Olafur Eliasson Studio in Prenzlauer Berg, several floors of an old brewery, all focussed on the kitchen on the first floor where the staff congregate at lunch-time (Eliasson has just published a cookbook):-
I have just arrived in Berlin, the first time I have been since the opening of the Neues Museum, which we have come to study in preparation for the opening of Burlington Gardens, another Chipperfield project which shares many of the same characteristics as the Neues Museum: a grand, mid-nineteenth-, century, neoclassical building full of academic and cultural pomp, needing to be brought into active public use in the twenty first century. I love the atmosphere of Berlin, staying on the Torstrasse in what was the old east Berlin.
We had the annual Whitebait Dinner last night, a ritual dating back to Turner’s day whereby a boatload of Academicians travel upriver or down in order to feast on a platter of whitebait, which was then, and remains, a cheap dish – fresh sprats rolled in flour and then fried. It wasn’t only painters who liked to travel downriver to the Trafalgar Tavern, but politicians too. This year we feasted in The Narrow, a pub at the entrance to Limehouse Basin, looking out across the bend in the river towards Canary Wharf:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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