Please revise the new fourth wing of the Pergamon Museum

Well, whoever looks at the plans in detail recognizes changes, and often it has been improvements. In contrast to Ungers, Kleihues is at least in principle ready to deal with the existing building, i.e. the pergamon museum designed between 1907 and 1930 after Alfred Messel’s preliminary draft by the Berlin City Councilor Ludwig Hoffmann.

The formal language of the rationalists

But some remained. For example, the rigid, heavy architectural language, which now shapes the unintelligent “Tempieto” new, huge-cubic entrance building, which, according to the drawings, should also shape the new fourth wing. According to Ungers and Kleihues, this is a “rationalistic” architectural language. It corresponds to mind, logic and natural laws.

It is a totalitarian, anti -historical approach, it is no coincidence that the works of the most important early rationalists such as Bouleee and Ledoux were referred to as “Revolutionary Architecture”, a Giuseppe Terragni with its wonderful buildings such as the Casa del Facio in Como served the dictator Mussolini.

There is no timelessness in architecture

Exactly their alleged rationalism because of their monumental forms, despite their monumentalness, do not fit the Pergamon Museum at all. There is a pillar in the way in the middle of the facades of the fourth wing and the “Tempieto”.

According to classic teaching, – which the Messel and Hoffmanns pergamon museum – was only adequately a passage between two pillars for monumental construction. So both had also thought of the airy convertible hall on the copper ditch, not as a heavy bar.

The continuous claim of museums and Kleihues that Ungers’ fourth wing “completes” this elegant idea of ​​its predecessors does not make them more correct. Even this middle pillar is an absolute claim to power by the architect about the real history of the house.

Architects such as Messel and Hoffmann were convinced of the power of history. And they loved the “language of the pillars”, they dominated. Ungers, on the other hand, wanted an architecture for all purposes, all goals, an abstract “timelessness”. But there is no in life, so it is not in architecture.

The design of Ungers can already be clearly dated: in the mid-1990s. And this time bound will be even clearer to be seen, if he was completed around 2040. It follows: Kleihues must be again, no longer submit to the survived myth of Ungers. Or it should be thought again about a new design competition for the “fourth wing”.