An Opportunity for Younger Architecture Offices

Entitled “The Museum of the 20th Century and its Integration into the Urban Environment” the ideas competition was held to clarify how the new museum building and its immediate surroundings could be designed; especially from the perspective of urban and open space planning.

The goal of the ideas competition was to acquire information for the scope and framework of the subsequent project competition. Based on the results, the SPK set additional urban and open space planning parameters for the design competition. And between 10 and 20 prizewinners would be eligible to take part in the design competition. So the ideas competition also gave architects who had not yet planned or constructed a large museum or similar building the opportunity to take part in a design competition.

How Was the Preliminary Document Review Carried Out?

The ideas competition was announced on September 3, 2015. A total of 460 teams of architects and landscape architects submitted their designs and models by mid-December 2015. The experts and competition organizers carried out the preliminary document review in January 2016.

During the review, the submitted entries were checked for completeness and plausibility. The reviewers did not eliminate any submissions during the preliminary review – this right was reserved for the jury. The jury members were not permitted to take part in the preliminary review. They would see the designs for the first time when they met.

460 Submissions – 10 Winners

The jury met from February 8 to 10, 2016. It consisted of seven expert judges and six procedural judges.

The jury evaluated all of the submitted entries. In the first round, one vote was enough to admit an entry to the next round. In the following round, every entry needed a majority to advance. Therefore, all of the jury members had to be present all of the time. Moreover, voting was compulsory; abstentions were not allowed. This procedure yielded a short list. Finally, the jury ranked the designs on the short list and chose the prizewinners. There were ten prizewinners in the ideas competition.

Offices from 40 Nations

The 460 offices that took part in the competition come from a total of 40 nations from all parts of the world. A little more than half of the offices are in Germany. Many teams come from Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria, Great Britain, France, Portugal, the USA, China and the Netherlands. Shared offices from Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Slovenia, Israel, Mexico, Poland, Serbia, Albania, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Greece, India, Ireland, Japan, Croatia, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Moldova, Peru, Russia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Turkey, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Cyprus also took part.

460 Solutions for the Kulturforum

Along with their designs, all of the participating shared offices submitted a model on a scale of 1:500.

The video clip shows how the submitted models look in relation to the surrounding buildings when they are placed in the model of the Kulturforum.

The designs ranged from structures that soared upward to submerged buildings. A great bandwidth of shapes from round, rectangular, egg-shaped and splintered to delicate or massive. Some designs took up the entire construction site while others only used one side of it; others used several buildings to define the site.

The Exhibition

All of the designs and models in the ideas competition were displayed at the Kulturforum from February 26 to March 13, 2016.

At the opening of the exhibition on February 25, 2016, Udo Kittelmann, Director of the Nationalgalerie, Arno Lederer, chairman of the jury, Regula Lüscher, Senate Building Director of the State of Berlin and Jürgen Tietz, architecture critic, took part in a panel discussion entitled “Enough Ideas for the Kulturforum?” Claudia Henne from Radio Berlin-Brandenburg moderated the exchange related to the competition entries and the Kulturforum’s situation.