On the Kunsthistoriches Museum

Kunsthistoriches Museum
Formally, if one is inclined to be moved by monolithic volumes, some in stone, others glazed in glass, graced by a rare beam of Berlin sunlight, or by the relentless dia-grid of a limestone floor pattern - then this building will hit the spot.
But personally it falls prey to creating only grand volumes, emulating in every way - but at 1/5 the scale - the diagonal movement, the floating bridges, the underground connections, the shifting stairways and the material palette of the Washington DC National Gallery of Art, leaving the galleries to fill the left-over periphery. The architecture, scaled down from the "Grand Projets" that Pei has been accustomed to, reads as an exercise in form, with the single-mindedness of a posthumous work. In this context, the galleries, then, become hostage to this diagram, that Mr.Pei has mastered so well in his 4 decades of museum building. Fortunately he has done better museums elsewhere, at the Miho in Japan (which we worked on), and more recently in Suzhou, where the public spaces and the relentless geometry have been overridden by other imperatives, stronger than the architecture: the site, nature and the process of getting to the museum in the first place. At the Kunsthistoriches, the circular cantilevered stairway seems so strenuously earnest for an entrance gesture, that you might as well just walk by it and down the side-street to Schinkel's plaza to enjoy the shade of the trees. The galleries and the "collection" are hardly worth the detour.