The Ultimate Cube

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the world's greatest living architect, has long been fascinated by the idea of building museums. In 1943, he outlined his concept for "a museum for a small city" in Architectural Forum. "The first problem," he said, "is to establish the museum as a center for the enjoyment, not the interment, of art." To do this, he proposed to erase "the barrier between the work of art and the community" with a garden approach for the display of sculpture, plus a single, glass-curtained gallery built on a steel frame with freestanding interior walls. "The architectural space thus achieved," he concluded, "becomes defining rather than confining."

This week, at the age of 82, Mies saw his dream come true, although from a distance. In West Berlin, the $6,250,000 new National Gallery, which he designed (and for which he laid the cornerstone in 1965), officially opened to the public. Ailing and confined to a wheelchair, Mies had to remain in Chicago, where he now travels from his cooperative apartment to his office only once or twice a month to examine the new models for the many Mies-designed buildings now under way.*Still, those who saw the museum in Berlin agreed that it may well be Mies' masterpiece, the ultimate in unusual, unadorned space enclosed within a pristine cube.

Hanging Walls. Among modern architects, Mies has always been considered the great classicist. It is thus no surprise that the Berlin museum bears a marked resemblance to a classical temple set upon a giant podium of granite-covered concrete. The podium, or semi-basement, is occupied by the burgeoning permanent collection, but the upper gallery, designed for special exhibitions, dominates the museum. It is simplicity itself: a glass-curtained box with a 213-ft.-square roof upheld by only eight burnished-steel columns. Mies has carried out his concept with subtlety. The columns, for instance, are tapered ever so slightly toward the top--as are the Parthenon's classical Doric columns. Although the museum's 6-ft.-thick roof looks perfectly flat, it too is designed to deceive the eye. The center has been slightly raised so that a disproportionately large share of the weight may be directed outward onto the columns.

Inside, the 8,020-sq.-ft. gallery space offers a tabula rasa for which Director Werner Haftmann, 56, must act as a kind of architect-curator. Each time he mounts an exhibition, he will not only have to hang the pictures on the walls but also hang the walls--movable partitions that can be suspended in any arrangement by means of wires from the roof. "This is a very great work," said Director Haftmann last week. "But we've got to learn how to use it." For opening day, he showed that he is learning fast by mounting a display of 73 suitably square-rigged paintings by Piet Mondrian in the gallery.

*Among them: Toronto's multistructure Dominion Centre, a new public library in Washington, apartments in Montreal and a federal center in Chicago.

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