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.

Animation, Drawing, Physical Model

Medium

Blender, Rhinoceros 3D, After Effects

Software

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.

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.