In an archive deep inside what was once East Germany,
safely under lock and key,
are documents which tell a remarkable story.
11 years of work is represented by nearly 3,000 files,
stacked into 352 metres of shelving.
These are from a pre-digital world.
Every plan, purchase order, design decision placed on paper,
over a million pages, of which nearly 400,000 are letters and faxes.
It is a paper trail from an epic process -
a single architectural project.
There is human drama here, conflict and collaboration.
A discussion about a staircase that went on for over a year.
The name on the files is David Chipperfield.
The project is the Neues Museum in Berlin.
Few buildings are more symbolic of the history of Germany
in the last century, but its restoration has transformed
it into something more powerful, more affecting
than anyone could have imagined.
A new building created from the remains of the old.
A fusion of past and present and a moment in architecture
that will be remembered long into the future.
I don't know any architect who hasn't been to the Neues Museum
and felt it was a masterpiece.
To spend 11 years on a museum in Berlin,
to go through the drudgery, the bureaucracy,
the sense that everyone is trying to stop what you are doing,
and to go through all of that
and still keep an idea alive - that is a remarkable achievement.
You walk around it and you think this is the work of madmen.
For a whole century, you know, including the architect.
I think that's so powerful. It changes you, going to that building.
Chipperfield is one of the few architects in the world who
can create a cocktail of conservative, almost a classicism,
and a very crisp modernism.
I think he's trying to cultivate a conversation,
not just within the office but within a wider society.
He's a very articulate architect.
The work begins with words, in a way.
But he lets beautiful materials, great spaces
and light do the talking for him.
I don't think he's trying to change the world other than to make it
a more civilised place.
APPLAUSE
Sir David Chipperfield, CBE,
Royal Gold Medallist, Stirling Prize winner,
is among the most admired and sought after architects in the world.
Earlier this year he was chosen to design a new contemporary wing
for that temple of culture,
New York's Metropolitan Museum Of Art.
Commissions don't come more prestigious than this.
What's more, the new building will replace the current galleries
which face onto the hallowed ground of Central Park.
He's come a long way from the frock shop in Sloane Street which
began his career.
To visit David Chipperfield in his office, you ascend a slightly tatty
'60s office block from a windswept corner next to Waterloo Station.
This is how you might imagine an architect's office should be -
space and light, tables for meeting and eating,
where even the tableware is designed by Chipperfield
for the Italian design house Alessi.
And have you noticed?
No computers, only models, and they are everywhere.
The physical model in our office remains the tool of exploration
and communication. I will only look at projects through physical
models because I think it gives us something to talk about
as a third person.
This is the Met.
The project is that we take this away,
even though it was built in the '80s, and build a new building.
So, you can see all of these different iterations which
have been going on through the competition stage of nearly
a year, and now were in a concept stage again
of developing the project.
So, even though they commissioned you,
that dialogue continues.
Yes, it starts again.
Since we have become much more digital in every aspect of life,
I think this physical presence of buildings has a lot more power.
In David's buildings, there's rarely a single image.
It's more complex.
It's not a one-liner.
I think David Chipperfield buildings don't come and grab you.
You have to sort of enter into his world to get it.
I've seen it happen before.
A month down you say, "Why was that stair there?"
"Well, it's... I thought it had to be there."
Just gotta be careful that it
doesn't become a wrong piece of information.
So, this is your eagle's nest here.
You're surrounded by the London that you,
well, I won't say - the London that you what?
Well, there is something sobering when you sit here
and you discuss architecture
and you stress about a staircase
or a plan or something small,
and then you lift your head up, and you look at that and you think,
"What's the important thing?
"Does designing a staircase have any relevance
"compared to designing a city?"
I mean, what's architecture for?
That's my worry. What are we doing as architects?
We're leveraging value on projects where value can be leveraged.
Architecture has always depended on investment,
but at the moment investment is a sort of wild beast.
The money that's coming here isn't just from someone
walking down the street and saying, "Oh, that's a nice site,
"maybe I could go to the bank and raise some money and develop it."
It's global money hovering around, trying to find a place to land.
London has changed dramatically
since Chipperfield started out as a young architect,
working in the offices of both Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.
There was still a heroic social aspect to the modern
architecture of the hi-tech era.
Richard and Norman both had strong... Social.
..utopian background. Yes.
I think the Pompidou Centre is the last great utopian building.
Willis Faber,
which I used to take people around as a member of the office,
is one of the great office environments,
very socially inventive.
We came out of school...with a completely different expectation.
Sitting in Richard Roger's office with about 12 people
after he'd built Pompidou,
you think, "Well, if he can't...."
He built Pompidou and that's all... That's all... What chance for the rest of us?
Salvation came in the shape of a shop.
I remember talking to one of my professors,
who was a university builder,
just couldn't believe that I was going to design a shop.
Why would I humiliate myself?
And I just thought, well, this is the best chance I'd ever seen.
The Miyake job was a quiet building, it was beautifully done,
very polished, very elegant, very minimal.
You could call what David was doing
sensual born-again modernism. It was a different take.
His shops were incredibly simple and he was trying to focus
people's perception of the store on the little shifts you can do at
that scale, whether it was change of materials or change of levels etc.
Rather than selling the shop as a kind of a market.
The success of the Issey Miyake store led to more stores
and to more work in Japan.
Japan became a huge patron for a whole emerging generation
of radical young architects.
A country which had
its own indigenous avant-garde architectural culture.
And David benefitted from that.
His first two or three stand-alone buildings were all built in Japan.
And those buildings were often built in urban contexts
which were very poorly defined or sometimes even rather hostile
and they have the character of castles, when I look at them.
They seem fortified, as if turning in on themselves.
Very preoccupied with an interior space,
and an interior passage of movement.
So they become these sort of worlds unto themselves.
Japanese culture seemed to value an appreciation of simple things,
clean lines,
the everyday made special.
It allowed Chipperfield space to be modern.
I was hired for three weeks to help on a Japanese competition
and I stayed for eight-and-a-half years.
And those first five years David struggled, it was very hard.
Very few people in Britain were interested in contemporary things.
Chipperfield's breakthrough in England occurred when he won
the competition for
the Museum Of River And Rowing in Henley Upon Thames.
A town where modern architecture was regarded with suspicion.
And at some point one of the planners said,
"You just have to think - would Prince Charles approve?"
I thought, hang on, this is not the criteria on which planning
applications should be considered. But, in a way, it was then.
And I think architects had underestimated
the need for the familiar as well as the strange.
In this case, the touch of the familiar was
the inclusion of a pitched roof in the design.
I realised if I didn't do a pitched roof I'd have no chance.
And actually it was shortlisted for the Mies van de Rohe prize,
and gossip had it that Prince Charles,
it was one of his favourite modern buildings at that time.
Which I probably shouldn't boast about too much. No, don't.
But in a way why not? One liked the building.
He did have a very hard time from, among others,
the Evening Standard, which launched a crusade
to stamp out Chipperfield in London.
Partly it was to do with this house for Nick Knight,
the photographer.
To me, it's a modestly scaled,
quiet, sensible addition to the street.
A street that I have been to,
characterised by militant pebbledash and half-timbering.
I think it actually contributed to
David's slight paranoia about the British press
and the sense that people were out to persecute him.
The lack of reception for his work did form him
to some extent.
I think there was an ever so slight bitterness,
if I can say that, and that fostered a kind of determination that
you see later, a kind of steeliness that you see in his work.
He is absolutely determined
to do things the way he wants to do things.
One of his early clients, converts even,
was the sculptor Antony Gormley.
We go to work in a David Chipperfield studio.
We live in a house that David helped us convert.
And we eat with David Chipperfield knives and forks.
So, we genuinely do depend on David Chipperfield
for our, as it were, external body.
The brief that we gave David was space, light and silence.
But there was immediately this understanding
about material and about volume
that absolutely caught Vicken and I
as being somebody who understood
about the relationship between light and material and space.
You could say that IS what architecture is.
It is bare architecture.
That bareness is put at the service of human life.
So that life itself, the way that human bodies occupy his spaces,
is its decoration.
And I respect and admire the way David has upheld
that notion of, in a way, the humanity of architecture.
Throughout the '90s, work of any note in Britain was hard to come by,
and the place where David Chipperfield came
to feel most at home was Berlin.
It's always intriguing to see what architects build for themselves
and in David's case this was the place to be.
In a typical Berlin courtyard,
there are a group of simple concrete buildings.
He has an apartment on the street side,
so you could say he lives above the shop.
I love his own house in Berlin,
I love that.
I think that's a kind of a dream house.
There's a Kantine, which is open to the public.
And at the back, offices occupy what was once a piano factory.
David's architecture begins with the city.
And that's a very different way of working
from most celebrity architects today,
who really are driven by the idea of architecture as an image.
Sharing this philosophy,
there are now over 200 architects working for Chipperfield,
with offices run by directors in Milan, Shanghai, London
and, of course, Berlin.
When we go for lunch and we see people coming from outside,
people from inside, sitting in the sun, enjoying their lunch...
Even other architects. That's the biggest reward!
That's the biggest reward, architects from across the street.
I mean, how much can you get?
Hosting events, entertaining,
mixing clients, neighbours, friends and, above all, artists - bringing
people together is clearly important for David and his wife, Evelyn.
I think she's had a very strong impact on bringing out
the European-ness in David.
She's managed to create a kind of, not exactly a salon culture,
but there is a circle around the Chipperfields.
There's a sense of creating a conversation around them.
'Tonight's discussion is all about the city,
'with his friend, the artist and photographer
'Thomas Struth.'
The picture I had of architects was quite negative.
I thought when I met an architect,
they were pretty arrogant and I always felt that they are
mostly vain and self-centred.
You'd better leave now!
LAUGHTER
'I think we get the picture.'
But Chipperfield has proved himself to be an architect who listens,
and that makes his a voice to be taken
seriously in the debate about the future of Berlin.
'And it all began with the Neues Museum.'
The Neues Museum was an amazing project for us, and it put us
very much into the middle of a reflection and a discussion
about Germany.
German history and German... and about Berlin.
How the city should... So, as the city's forming,
trying to deal with past and future,
the Neues Museum was seen as
a valuable contribution to that discussion.
You were doing it from '97 till... Took you how many years?
The first competition we started in '94, the first round was '94,
so we started thinking about that project
five years after the Wall came down.
Did you see this as something to help bring
Germany and Berlin together?
Was it part of the project?
I was only an architect. Oh, come on.
Chipperfield's campus is in the Mitte district,
once part of East Berlin.
It is a mixed area, with Plattenbau, the concrete prefab blocks
so characteristic of the GDR, just at the end of the street.
David says he loves the neighbourhood because it has
room for the unexpected.
Today, that includes a visit from
film director Wim Wenders,
who is joining us on a walk through the city.
So, our common neighbourhood.
You live near here? I am just around the corner. He lives up there.
I can look into their shower.
Yeah...we've got a sort of anti-Wim curtain on our shower.
Because when they found out I could see them
taking a shower they got scared.
In the aftermath of the Second World War,
when the reconstruction of Berlin began,
it soon became clear that two distinct cities were emerging.
The division between East and West was made concrete
by the building of the Berlin Wall.
Were you from the East or the West? You're from the West.
I'm from the West, but the first thing I did was moving here
because I thought it was so much more interesting.
Wenders was in Australia when the Wall came down.
Like many of the rest of us, he watched it on TV,
with its news reports of Stasi archives, and banana shortages,
and close encounters with that symbol of the East, the Trabant.
Friends of mine
whose parents had ordered one a couple of years before the Wall
fell down, and they were delivered one after the wall fell down!
And nobody wanted them any more.
They got that Trabant a year too late.
So, you were working across with people in East Germany.
I had friends there, directors and stuff,
but we couldn't really work here, you see.
For Wings Of Desire, I tried very hard to shoot in East Berlin,
but they wouldn't let me. They wouldn't?
No, they wouldn't let me because I made a movie without a script.
They were afraid? Yeah, they were afraid.
Wenders' angel's-eye view looks down upon Berliners
of a divided city.
The pattern of courtyards revealed is a survival from
the 19th century, but it still helps to make Berlin what it is today.
The courtyard system is a fairly unique Berlin typology.
It's a way of getting more density into the centres.
You couldn't get more dense in a way. Look, here.
You can see all the way. Oh, yeah.
And some were very regulated, like no kid was allowed to play.
And you still sometimes see the signs.
No playing, and no cleaning of carpets.
Well, I suppose they felt there had to be rules?
Yeah, Germans love rules. Do they?
They invented all the rules.
We could have picked a nicer day.
Yeah, that was Alan's fault.
Funny to get to see your own city like this.
So now we come to one of the landmarks,
and one of my favourite places.
This is one of the last remaining dance halls,
and there's dancing still there every night of the week.
This has all been stage managed by Wim.
I mean, this is a film set. It's not for real, surely.
HE HUMS
There's a Berlin factor
that heightens the meaning of things.
You scratch the surface and you find history.
These photographs were taken in the mid-'70s,
at the height of the Cold War.
This dance hall. is a Berlin survivor.
So many stories, so many ghosts.
This becomes very nostalgic,
and in a way unsustainable.
On the other hand, it's a shame
that the texture of East Berlin has been lost.
And then you've got to hold on to it through something
like this, which is in a way an unsustainable level of dilapidation.
I love this place.
And you can still play soccer in the middle of the city.
This is what a city should be like, no?
Destruction and dilapidation have defined Berlin -
a legacy of the war and the Wall.
There was one grand public building
in the heart of the city
which remained a ruin for over 50 years.
The Neues Museum.
It was designed by neoclassical architect
August Stuler for King Friedrich Willhelm IV of Prussia.
It was a way of affirming power through art when it was
built in the 19th century,
but the 20th all but destroyed it.
It was bombed by the Allies, pockmarked by bullets
and shrapnel as the Red Army took possession of the city,
and left to rot during the GDR.
The weight of all this history would eventually
fall on the shoulders of this quietly spoken Englishman.
The restored Neues Museum today,
looks at a distance like what it was meant to be,
an evocation of Classical Greece transported to Berlin.
But look closer and you can see the scars of history.
They are there because of a decision taken not to restore, but
to keep, clean and repair the fabric of the building that survived.
To treat it in effect like the fragments of a precious Greek vase.
Some spaces required dramatic intervention.
The grand staircase hall, linking the three storeys of the museum,
had been bombed right through to the basement.
It would need something special from the architects to live up to
what had been lost.
This is quite a bold proposition.
In a way, that's what we thought,
but interestingly all alternative ideas didn't work with the room.
And then you realise that the room and the stair
are dynamically integrated.
This diagonal experience of the space leading to the light.
This one coming up to this light. You just couldn't get
anything else to be as convincing.
Preservation of the ruin meant listening to all its stories.
The fabric showed the scars of war,
and in one corner the walls were blackened by fires
from the Battle for Berlin, when the women and children of the city
were among the last left to fight against the advancing Russians.
Did you have to look at each of these areas
and these spaces and think, "What's the story here?
"Why is this here? Should we keep it? Should we not keep it?"
Is that what you did?
It's a detail and it's hidden there.
Just at a second glimpse,
you realise suddenly where it comes from. And that's it.
At the concept stage, not all Berliners were convinced.
Some continued to demand full restoration.
A campaign was mounted against the Chipperfield plans.
Watercolours showing the polychromatic glories
of Stuler's interior were compared to stark concrete.
There was a confrontational atmosphere,
the citizens almost rose up.
SHE SPEAKS IN GERMAN
But Chipperfield, interestingly, didn't see that as a problem,
he saw that as a wonderful opportunity.
It meant that the citizens were interested in what's going on.
Once people are passionate, and interested,
then they become involved in the process,
and it was a dialogue in a way that I think
a lot of other buildings are not.
The starting point for the process was an analysis of the ruin,
by Julian Harrap, the conservation architect.
We'd be involved in actually trying
to give, if you like, a rating to each piece of fabric.
And it might go from utter and total deconstruction,
wrecked walls, missing brickwork, and then it might
move along to a point at the other end of the room where you've
got wall paintings in almost perfect condition.
And so this idea of graduating each space
according to its components was fundamental.
The dialogue around the building extended to craftsmen, conservators,
and contractors, all dedicated to the same brick-by-brick
problem solving that was becoming an adventure in architecture.
There was some stereotypical Germanic precision involved too.
The concrete pieces are enormous but they are produced
with an incredible precision.
They have 5mm joints.
And if you imagine 5mm and they have plus minus 1mm,
and if you go ten metres like that,
four metres up and then plus minus one, this is very precise,
almost Egyptian, I would say.
Stuler's original museum changed themes and structure
from room to room.
Greek, Egyptian, vaulted, columned.
It gave the architects license to change their approach
room by room in response.
The museum's curators and directors were part of the conversation.
The collection to be displayed influenced decisions at every turn.
Some of the Egyptian collection was quite literally brought into
the sun by a new cage-like construction
designed by Chipperfield.
The way the new inserts itself within the old is surprising.
Because you are always aware that there are new acts in the building,
but not in the way that is let's say contradictory with what's there.
Somehow the whole is bigger, more alive,
and actually richer with David's intervention.
And that richness is very appealing.
The decoration had been lost,
in many places, so where we had lost it completely,
we faked the grid again.
Just did that as an impression.
So you got the sense of pattern.
Every single square inch of that building is
denoted on a drawing like this.
It's one of those drawings that links...that really tells you
what architects do.
And I get really excited to see this
because it is as authored as the napkin sketch,
this is as much what David is as that little doodle.
This is really the work of David Chipperfield architects.
That kind of ruin was a problem, it was a really big problem,
no-one knew what to do with it, how to handle its neoclassical
heritage, or its GDR heritage, or the World War II heritage
and all of those things were impossible to deal with.
There was a desire by the client to have a much flashier,
much more 21st century-looking building.
Renowned American architect Frank Gehry was Chipperfield's
chief rival in the architectural competition for the project.
The process was tortuous and the presentations took place
in this room.
As a young architect I had the drawings
pinned on the wall and the general director,
who had wanted Gehry,
after about five minutes, stood up, came to my drawings, hit them
and said, "This is shit."
"I do not need this, this is shit. This is absolute shit."
And walked out.
And I was like five minutes... And there was like 30 people there.
And I said, "So now what do I do?"
And I thought, "The most important person in the jury
"has just left the room."
Then we got a phone call after saying,
look, we've decided to do a second round with you
and Gehry. So, congratulations...
So we were given another two months and it was head-to-head.
And, in fact, recently someone said to me, "During high noon..."
And I said, "What's high noon?"
"You know when you and Gehry were..."
It became a sort of... So, it was on the same day?
Yeah, I mean, we didn't literally...
And so we presented and at the end of the presentation,
the director came up to me and said, "Fantastic."
What happened in the interim?
You can't... In England, you don't talk to each other for 20 years.
That's also where I got my CBE, in that room.
Oh, really. Deliberate.
In the very room where you were humiliated.
From the Queen personally.
Yes.
'And as if that wasn't enough, Prince Charles
'and the Duchess of Cornwall came for a personal tour,
'and so did the most powerful woman in Europe,
'rumoured to be David Chipperfield's newest and biggest fan,
'the President of the German Republic, Angela Merkel.'
It does have a very special character.
Even as I walk round today, there are certain sorts
of things - the fall of the light in the western sun is fantastic.
And the discovery of tiny little things which happen
is going to keep me going there for a very long time.
Every decision had to be formulated by us,
then had to be proposed by us, then had to be
approved by the user group and a delivery agency...
I felt it could have stayed empty
because the building as such was so extraordinary.
It was such an incredible document of history.
A tasting of everything that happened to this city over...
Yes, what a great narrative that suddenly came to life.
The story was all there, and it almost seemed a waste to put
it full of art.
Just saying that when he went to the Neues Museum that it seemed
a waste to put any art in it
because the narrative and the story was so rich.
You didn't need all the art in there.
We'd better cut that out. Can we cut that out?
No, why? Makes it even richer.
# This time tomorrow
# Where will we be?
# On a spaceship somewhere
# Sailing across an empty sea
# This time tomorrow... #
It is a mess, Berlin, but it's a nice mess, no?
'The success of the Neues Museum has led to an even more ambitious
'role for David Chipperfield in the future of the city he loves.'
He is now responsible for the master plan for Museum Island
in the heart of Berlin.
It began as King Frederich Willhelm's romantic sketch
for a "sanctuary of art and science" in 1841.
Prince Charles would definitely approve.
Admittedly, he couldn't
have predicted that a railway would run through the middle of it.
The long term timescale of this city plan is unbelievably
rare in architecture these days.
In England, you have discussion about planning things
about three years ahead or something, maximum.
Here you're in meetings and they say,
"Well, if we open the south wing in 2019
"we could do the north wing in 2024, it means
"that we can bring the connection to..."
And you're sitting in this room...
You're thinking, "Will I still be here?"
# I can see the world and it ain't so big at all... #
Whatever the future brings, Chipperfield has
already made his mark.
That's a Chipperfield building,
And so is this, a townhouse art gallery on a prize site that
rather playfully seems to both fit in and stand out at the same time.
Those windows are really tall.
So this is our corner of Berlin.
It's a ringside seat for the main event,
a view of the Neues Museum.
But even that is changing as another Chipperfield building
rises from the construction site opposite.
It's a new gallery and a grand public entrance to Museum Island.
So what this building does is add a whole load
of facilities that the Museum Island doesn't have.
And then it sort of helps bind together all the buildings.
So it's both familiar and unfamiliar.
You know, it's somehow both...
It actually has the illusion of being quite historical,
but actually it's extremely minimal and modern.
It's going to be heroic.
It's not as soft as people might think it might be,
it's going to be a little bit shocking.
Chipperfield's vision in columns and glass is a bold one,
and it's inspired by a monumental work of modernism by his great hero,
the German-born architect, Mies van der Rohe.
It's a building which plays an important role
in the story of West Berlin.
Once the city was divided, of course,
the west had lost all its museums,
so then they had to build these alternative institutions.
And a rather strange place to build it in a way.
So, this new centre - the cultural centre -
was not in the centre of the west,
but as close to the wall as possible.
Provocatively, in a way,
reminding people just over there how good it was over here.
It's a strange moment when a temple of modernism begins to show its age.
Chipperfield has won the job of refurbishing it.
You can just see the level of trust that the German people
have in David to feel comfortable
to let him deal with this masterpiece of Mies van der Rohe's.
It's an unique opportunity to get forensically close to the
work of the man who famously pronounced that, "Less is more,"
and that, "God is in the detail."
The roof was built as a plate on the floor
and, as it went up, the legs swang in.
And no-one had done something like that before.
Was he on the site when this was all done?
Well, he came to see the lifting of the roof and he,
I think as an act of bravado, went underneath the roof to prove how...
Do you do things like that yourself? No, no!
Restoring a Mies building is not going to be easy.
Every element, every joint, is part of the architecture.
Even its plan has a graphic purity.
This is a formidable drawing of Mies's van der Rohe's
Neue Nationalgalerie Gallery in Berlin
and it's a reflected ceiling plan showing
that extraordinary grid within a grid within a grid
of the kind of Mies van der Rohe module
of this square temple in the centre of Berlin.
I must say, for me, it's one of those moments where the apprentice meets the master.
This is a glass and steel building.
It's also a gallery in which art has to be exhibited.
I mean, most people would say, "Well, most galleries, they have hardly any light coming in."
This is all about light. How do you deal with that in relation
to your responsibility towards what comes in here and how are you -
are you thinking hard about that?
Mies was challenged early on that
this was going to be a problem
and he amusingly said,
"I know, but I think it is such an interesting concept,
"I feel obliged to pursue it."
Which, I think is... Bugger off! It's a good line to use against your clients,
but I'm not sure we could ever do that ourselves.
Mies had this idea about how you would do it.
So, he hung panels in here and you walked in and it sort of worked.
Now, the building has an authority and somehow it's part of nature,
it's part of the city and everyone recognises that this is
the great room of Berlin.
But you can see that simple things over the years
have just gradually eroded the quality.
I mean, one of the biggest problems has been the glass.
I would say this architecture forgives... Nothing.
Forgives nothing. Well, because...
God is in the detail, according to Mies.
And of course this is a very minimal building, obviously, in that sense,
so every single... You've got very few materials you're using... Uh-huh.
..and they've got to be right.
This materiality is fundamental,
but it's full of weaknesses in terms of how we now would build up
an isolation between inside and outside.
So, great sheets of condensation form on the inside of this building.
They even anticipated that moisture, cos this is like a rain...
This is like a gutter.
We're going to spend a lot of money restoring this building.
So, therefore, if we're going to restore it, surely we're going
to solve all the technical problems that the building carries.
Otherwise, why would you spend that money?
On the other hand, we are restoring Mies.
So, surely if you're going to restore Mies,
you're going to restore Mies.
You have to be true to Mies.
What's the point of killing Mies in protecting him?
So, you actually have to have a cross-cultural dialogue.
You know, in England I think it would get project managed out of it.
Yeah, and they would say, "I'm sorry that's costing that much more,
"no-one's going to tell the difference..."
We've talked about this enough,
we've had two meetings and we've just got to make a decision.
In Germany, you can have 20 meetings, you can have 40 meetings,
it doesn't matter.
But you do, don't you? Yeah, you do. Until you get it right.
How many meetings have there been about the carpet?
Quite a few!
The carpet's not over. The carpet's not over?
Mies had nothing to do with this. No, no, no. Of course, he chose that.
He chose this? This is sacred lino.
Hello. Hello.
He didn't just say, "You go through that door
"and it's all rubbish in there and I'm not interested."
This is really carefully thought through furniture.
And the table... The table? That's a Mies table? Yeah.
It's half of it. Half a Mies table. They cut it, they were too big.
God, that's the most shocking thing you've said today -
a Mies table was cut in half!
Look how beautiful that is. He did love the way to build.
I mean, he was absolutely interested in construction -
not image. I mean, the problem about architecture now is that
we've become more interested in the virtual
than we are in the experiential. And the problem is
that a lot of architecture is known through image anyway.
Well, it's an interesting point
that we never talk about with architecture,
which is how a building feels. You know, it's not a...
Absolutely. Very difficult to discuss.
And yet, that's what it's about. How does a building feel?
Thank you very much. Absolutely.
The last exhibition in the New National Gallery, a prologue
to renovation, was this installation by Chipperfield himself.
A play on the history of the column, called Sticks and Stones.
It's no accident today that he makes the core of his practice
in cultural buildings and he does them brilliantly.
He understands how artists want to work,
he understands how curators want to work.
He never seems to do a bad one when it comes to museums and galleries.
And of course those have become the cathedrals of our time.
I think David's work is always conceived
in response to the nature of the place in which it sits.
Something like Hepworth, it almost adopts the River Calder as a moat
with a bridge running across and it has those steep concrete walls,
with quite minimal fenestration.
What was so interesting about the site that we were given
is that it was, in my opinion, completely three dimensional.
And of course, that brought me into a nervous moment
of architecture as sculpture, which I am very nervous of.
But instead of just putting a shape on top of something,
I was interested in the idea of articulating the rooms of a museum
and extending those - extrapolating out of those rooms - form.
And the light is quite important, isn't it?
Where the light's coming into those spaces.
Well, that was the other part of this little jigsaw puzzle.
To bring light in through a roof in an even way
onto an art space is quite complex
and by the time it gets to the wall plane, to the picture plane,
it's sort of fizzled out a bit.
So, this was a strategy of not bringing real light onto the wall
or onto the floor but, in a way like church light,
I call it church light.
It was that connection to daylight
that reminded you of the weather and the fact that you're in a room.
Making architecture for art is a very specific task
because it's not about how you live,
it's not about your daily life, it's about a visit
and it's a completely different set of critical elements
between the viewer and the art work.
It's an architecture which must step back
and let the art work come forward.
And Hepworth does it incredibly well
and yet manages to be the closest thing, one might say,
to an iconic building that David has done.
But Wakefield needed a building that had presence in that way.
One of the questions that remains out there -
can we only find architecture now in museums?
I am very self-conscious that we are in a sort of green zone in
doing museum architecture because you are privileged generally to be
in an environment where everyone's roughly going in the same direction.
There are no explicit enemies. Um...
..at the same time, being an architect out there,
outside of the green zone in the commercial world
is becoming increasingly difficult
and architecture has become increasingly isolated.
Buildings have become isolated from the fabric of the city.
They don't just replace, you know, you don't take one building down,
replace it with something roughly the same size and slot it back in.
You take ten buildings down and build a tower.
When I was director of the Venice Biennale my theme was Common Ground,
and of course I was lamenting the lack of common ground between...
..society and the profession.
At first glance, this unassuming seaside village in a corner of Spain,
is the last place you'd expect a world-renowned architect
to build a home.
Initially, it was just the family's holidays, then extended a bit
and then gradually the opportunity arose to build a house there,
to invite people and actually we have meetings there
as much as he has his holidays.
That annual break, which isn't really a break because he invites
the world to come and join him and indeed see things his way.
There's the beauty of this natural environment,
but also it's a kind of quite ordinary
because some people might say even it's a quite ugly town.
I think you can use the word ugly. Can I? So, what brought you here?
I mean, it started off for us really innocently as, you know,
trying to work out where to take the kids in the summer for a few weeks
and it grew into something else.
To be in a place of such incredible natural beauty
and of people who actually,
I have to say, I've understood better and better
that they have a deep love of the place, a deep love for the place.
You know, there's something very content about that.
And that's something which I think societally we've sort of lost.
Globalisation puts us in a situation
where we always want to be somewhere else.
And...
what has been the great experience here is that
we've found a place to be,
we've tried to, um, be part of it.
You have a kind of quite benign view
of what people do to their own homes, right?
Typical Galician village was granite, granite, granite.
Then, they added.
They stuck tiles on things and, you know, they added areas.
That might cheer you up!
One person does it and then the next one decides to copy it.
And this has got a 3D print on it.
I wouldn't be at all surprised in another ten years, you know,
cos underneath that is real stone like that.
So, they've just layered that on top? They are just layers on top.
At least it is a sort of engagement.
Un pueblo bonito que tenemos. Si.
Bonito y tranquilo y saludable, aqui si. Exactamente.
What did she say to you? She said,
"It's a very pretty village and very tranquil and nice to be in."
No, but you know, there's something pleasant about it.
There is, there's something charming about it and, everywhere you go,
something hits you by surprise.
Yeah. It's full of texture, it's full of life.
And is a lot of it ugly?
Yeah, sure. But the problem with design and architecture -
and especially now - it takes itself too seriously.
And in the end you've gotta remember what it's for -
it's about people, it's not THAT important.
And here we are, actually, this is your home.
There was a gap in the village - and it's a really strange gap -
and you can see that the street turns,
all the buildings stick out in a funny way,
so I didn't know how to design a house
that fitted into this strange geometry.
It's very inspired by Alvaro Siza, whose...
CAR HORN TOOTS
Right by the traffic lights - the only traffic lights in town.
Shall we go in? Yes.
It's actually quite a small house.
So, how does he manage to get so many people into it?
Space, light and the right materials.
This is...
So, that's the view.
That is quite something!
It is interesting. Villagers will come in here,
then they stand and look at the view all the time.
They say, "Wow, that's a fantastic view,"
and you say, "Well, you know, you've always had it!"
But there's something about framing a view,
or you know, intensifying something.
And I think that's something which, you know, interests me
is the idea of, you know, making ordinary things more special.
There's no hiding in a house.
It's like trying to write a poem, rather than a novel.
Because a novel is a big baggy thing,
which can allow all sorts of things to happen,
but the house is a way to develop ideas with great clarity.
And they all show - you can't bluff with a house.
He wants to make a building that...
..resonates with your life.
In that sense, he's a space doctor.
He knows that life is messy,
but he likes to make very beautiful cupboards
to put the mess away in.
We shouldn't leave Evelyn out of this
because together they've become an extraordinary team.
I'm Manola. Manola. Que pasa con Manola?
THEY SPEAK SPANISH
She's so, I think, emotionally intelligent
and Evelyn's interest in the human relations
within the Chipperfield practice
has been absolutely intrinsic to its success.
This house, the space that you've created, he's created,
it's quite small, isn't it?
Well, it was a tiny little triangle in the village
and the neighbour wanted it for his car
and I think the only reason why the man who owned it sold it to us
is because he started to worry that this neighbour -
who he really disliked intensely -
would actually get it for his car.
So, he sold it to us and it did look like a triangle, like something that
nobody could do anything with.
And I suppose I have a good architect!
I sense about David that somehow,
despite his passion for architecture,
I think, sometimes I feel he's disappointed
with what architecture is achieving.
Disappointment is not a word that I would associate with him -
he's never a victim.
You know, he always feels huge responsibility for...
..doing something in the way in which he feels it could be done,
or at least attempting to.
I mean, he never feels it's done well enough.
That is sometimes nerve-racking. I mean he always, you know,
to say, "Not bad," is the height of praise.
So, what would David be if he wasn't an architect?
What would be the thing that would give him satisfaction?
Oh, God. I would think he probably would do anything, you know,
anything in a very similar way.
He's often said he'd love to be a chef.
Apparently, before he was an architect he thought of being a vet,
which I can't imagine at all.
He'd love to write novels.
SHE LAUGHS
But I think he likes to be an architect!
David's sailing can be a metaphor for a man that has...
..sailed his own course.
With a distant horizon - he was never one for short gains.
David became fanatic over the years about sailing,
the whole family did and it's sort of great, you know.
He takes people on the big boat.
The children grew up sailing here
and so I had to try and keep up with them.
So, I learnt sailing at the same time as they did.
Of course, they are natural sailors and I'm not.
They, you know, I can't really sail without them, we do it as a family.
Essentially, what we do here is to swap our anxieties from,
you know, the abstract ones to the physical ones, the real ones.
But then people say to me,
"Yeah, but why do you have 18 people in your house?
"Why do you bring all these people here?"
I mean, you know, we have something like 150 people over the summer
or some ridiculous number.
For me, that's the other aspect,
that the world isn't just the physical,
it's also sitting down with people
and you know communing and enjoying that.
I mean, these sound terribly cliched ideas.
Gabriel tells me that when you were designing this kitchen
you were obsessive and fanatical
about every single thing in this kitchen.
If you're using something all the time and I know how to use it,
I know all the problems of it, when I redesigned it
I tried to solve all the issues that were there before.
The dishwasher used to be this side, so people used to come and...
So, I try to keep a barrier here.
I think, unlike quite a lot of architects,
you absolutely believe that it is a collaboration
and it's a collaboration with the environment, with the...
Because - A: I just don't like fighting.
I'm not confrontational and therefore I find that difficult.
And secondly, I think, instead of you there and me there,
we should both be looking at the same thing. Yeah.
You want everybody...
If that's the problem and that's the issue,
we should all be looking at it.
It's sort of a white colour, it's quite a modern bridge.
It's concrete. Yeah, exactly.
So, you've not really chosen to reference the brick in any way.
If you use the brick of the building,
you're not going to convince anybody
that that piece is part of the original building.
It seems that for Chipperfield the conversation really never stops.
So, you have the bridge and the bridge comes...
how do you actually get through that?
So, we bring this floor lower,
to the same level of this cast corridor.
If we take all of this back of house stuff away...
..take away all of this crap -
and it will become a rather beautiful introduction -
and another dimension to the Royal Academy.
And it will open in our 250th anniversary, which is 2018.
The new master plan will bring
all the buildings of the Royal Academy together,
along with the tribes that inhabit them -
the curators, the art handlers, the students, the academicians -
and they've all got a point of view.
This conversation has been going on for seven years.
And if that's not enough of a challenge, this could well be.
David Chipperfield comes to New York every month to meet with his clients
at the Met led by its director Thomas Campbell.
For the Met in New York,
perhaps the most well-endowed museum on the planet,
to choose an architect from London is a fantastic achievement.
It has to be the moment when David can finally relax.
He's made it.
Well, maybe.
Going round and round this building,
why one likes so much of the 5th Avenue side of the building
and other parts, is that you get the feeling that the architecture
is somehow part of the gallery spaces.
Why Modern Contemporary is so disappointing is that you feel
you are in a world of dry wall and panelling.
You don't feel that there's anything there that wouldn't just be
blown away by a strong wind.
Things don't feel like they're on purpose. No, exactly.
And there's a competition, rather than a reinforcement. Yeah.
The Met extension is a big deal.
It involves demolishing the whole Modern and Contemporary Wing,
designed in the 1980s by Kevin Roache and Partners.
What Roache did was just kind of bang something very new against
something old and say, "Talk to each other."
But they never really did talk to each other very well.
So, my hope is that what David Chipperfield does is in this
newer tradition of juxtaposing
modern and traditional architecture
in a way that actually encourages them to speak,
rather than having them stare at each other not talking.
Conventionally, you put the desk there, the coat check
and all that stuff.
The stakes are high and New York cultural politics is a tough game.
A lot of people will need persuading.
That is David's vision, under the drape,
but we're not allowed to show the model.
The Met will need to tread carefully, this is sensitive ground.
Two major New York institutions have recently had to abandon
expansion plans because of public opposition.
David, let me take a snapshot.
An Instagram moment. Of you!
HE LAUGHS
It is extraordinary.
What you're getting here is not only the New York skyline
but the Met is known as the only building in Central Park.
Everybody always wanted the museum and the park to connect better,
maybe now it can happen.
And if its better than what we see there now,
I would expect - and in fact hope -
that the public response would be positive.
But all of that said, in New York you really can't predict anything.
It is a bit strange to knock down a building that isn't so old.
I mean, the people in the museum remember the opening.
I've been looking at this for a long time,
so I see a lot of different things.
Everyone presumes that as an architect,
you're used to visualising,
therefore you know what it's going to look like.
But, to be honest, it's never that easy.