From Mies to Zumthor. An idea of Museum: from the muses to the factory

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the concept of museum that Mies van der Rohe offers - starting from the German Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels in 1935, unfortunately not built, passing through a Museum for a small city in 1943 and ending with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1968 - and to show how this typological-spatial principle has to a large extent determined and made possible a series of influences and relative declinations in the contemporary conception of the museum as a free and available “space of the artwork | work space”, as a place of meeting and communication assumed and as a “Making workshop | craft factory” exemplified by Peter Zumthor's recent Werkraum at Andelsbuch in 2013.

Keywords

• mies
• museo-fabbrica
• zumthor-mies