The story
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe left Germany for America in the 1930s and returned near the end of his life to build one last thing in Berlin. The Neue Nationalgalerie, finished in 1968, is a black steel roof floating over a glass box on a granite platform, an almost empty temple with the collection kept in the daylit basement below. It was the summing-up of everything he had argued about steel and glass.
The gallery holds Berlin's 20th-century art, the Expressionists and the sharp-eyed painters of the Weimar years, George Grosz and Otto Dix among them, recording the city between the wars.
By its fiftieth year the building was worn out, and the architect David Chipperfield took it apart down to the last screw and put it back, cleaning and repairing without changing Mies's lines, before it reopened in 2021. The upper hall is often left almost bare, holding a single sculpture in all that glass, exactly as its architect liked.
