Reframe :
Looking Inward, Gazing Outward
A proposal for the Museum of the 20th Century. The project reactivates the immediate urban fabric by inserting instances of fragmented domesticity into the expansiveness of a field of monuments.
Medium
Animation, Drawing, Physical Model
Software
Blender, Rhinoceros 3D, After Effects
Tiergarten Asset Catalogue
The site for the Museum of the 20th Century is located in the Tiergarten District, on the “Kulturforum”, that contains a series of archetypal museums and institutions such as the Neue Nationalgalerie, the New Berlin State Library, and the Berlin Philharmonic. From the late 19th century towards the early 20th century, the Tiergarten District functioned as a suburban residential area that was marked by building density and pedestrian traffic. Today, the site operates as a field of monuments, foregrounded by architectural thresholds, plinths, and self-enclosed structures that have divided the urban fabric and limited movement. The proposal reintroduces volumetric typologies that correspond to housing, specifically the Berlin L-type, in order to recover a mode of circulation that is the essence of Berlin. By doing so, it reactivates the Tiergarten as a place of convergence and newfound urban activity.
As it stands, the contemporary role of the museum operates on the premise of mobility and collection. The museum, as an entity, has been regarded as a self-contained form of nomadic architecture that can reside anywhere and collect anything. It is entrenched in internal curation and systematic views that are partial and, at times, inaccessible. The proposal for the Museum of the 20th Century expands upon the idea of the collection, but it transforms the museum into a collection of timeless urban assets that reside somewhere.
Narrative animation
Each view corridor engages in specific narratives related to the art of the collection and different spatial layouts. By adjusting cinematic variables, the view narrative shapes the viewer’s experience and interpretation of the museum and the artworks on display. By extracting filmmaking and cinematographic techniques, including storyboarding and curation of camera movements, the project is experienced as a series of narratives and scenes specific to each of the museum’s 6 collections.
Six sightlines, one for each of the collections housed in the museum, are mapped across the Museum in order to create visual and spatial continuity with the site by creating view corridors, large-scale atriums, and sunken courtyards.
View corridors repeatedly intersect and divide the gallery spaces of the museum. These transversal paths provide breaks from the galleries and signal a shift in modes of viewing and circulation. Each of these terminate with specific, framed views of the site and establish datum lines for the adjacent vertical circulation and atriums. In addition to creating framed views of the city, the view corridors establish networks of collection-specific circulatory paths. Through the domestic spatial layouts of gallery spaces, the viewer is no longer directly exposed to the outside, instead the context is reframed and transformed as a cinematic narrative.
Each view corridor engages in specific narratives related to the art of the collection and different spatial layouts. By adjusting cinematic variables, the view narrative shapes the viewer’s experience and interpretation of the museum and the artworks on display. By extracting filmmaking and cinematographic techniques, including storyboarding and curation of camera movements, the project is experienced as a series of narratives and scenes specific to each of the museum’s 6 collections
Composite Views
View Matrix
The view catalog, created by juxtaposing individual view frames captured throughout the project, functions as a view matrix, mapped onto the vitrine which itself becomes a viewing apparatus.
