Neue Nationalgalerie

The Neue Nationalgalerie was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1968 in West Berlin, the architect's final building and his only major commission realized in Germany after he emigrated to the United States in 1937. The museum takes the form of a glass-walled pavilion beneath a single flat black steel roof, a coffered plate roughly 65 meters square supported on just eight slender steel columns set well back from the building's edges, leaving the glass walls entirely free of visible structural support. Mies raised this glass hall on a granite-clad podium, with the museum's main permanent collection galleries housed below grade in windowless rooms, reserving the celebrated upper pavilion largely for temporary exhibitions and events. The building's extreme structural clarity, a single unobstructed room defined almost entirely by its roof and supporting columns, distilled architectural ideas Mies had been developing since his early German pavilions of the 1920s into what he considered a universal, flexible space. A major renovation led by the architect David Chipperfield, completed in 2021, restored the building closely to Mies's original design after decades of wear.