The Value of Trust and The Art of Building Museums

By Philip Jodidio - 1 April 2025

Calm and understated, David Chipperfield has emerged as one of the most important contemporary architects, winning the 2023 Pritzker Prize. He has taken on complex museum projects, notably in Berlin, but also in several other countries. His consensual method, and his reliance on trust have made him a figure apart in the celebrity-driven world of architecture. He explains his approach in an interview with Philip Jodidio.

David Chipperfield, born in London in 1953, studied at the Kingston School of Art and received his Diploma in Architecture from the Architectural Association in 1977. He then worked in the offices of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, before establishing David Chipperfield Architects in London in 1985. The high-tech exuberance of both these masters was not to be the style of Chipperfield, instead he has consistently remained in what might be termed a classical or even minimal modern register. Chipperfield stepped into the international architecture scene with his work on the Museumsinsel (Museums Island) of Berlin, beginning with the complex renovation of the Neues Museum (1997-2009). The relatively austere columns seen in his Museum of Modern Literature (Marbach, Germany, 2001-06) are present in a different register in the James-Simon-Galerie (1999-2019), also on the Museumsinsel of Berlin. His other museums include the Museo Jumex (Mexico City, 2009-13); an extension to the Saint Louis Art Museum (Missouri, USA, 2005-13); Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center (Alaska, USA, 2003-09); The Hepworth Wakefield (West Yorkshire, UK, 2003-11); Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK, 2006-13); the Mudec – Museo delle Culture in Milan (2000-15); and the West Bund Museum (Shanghai, 2013-19). Chipperfield’s extension to the Kunsthaus Zürich museum (Switzerland, 2008-20) is in fact larger than the earlier Karl Moser building (1925-29). In Berlin, he also took on the complex refurbishment of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, built in the 1960s (1963-68) and renovated between 2012 and 2021. Current museum work includes the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg, Germany, 2021) and an extension to the National Archeological Museum in Athens (Greece, 2022).

David Chipperfield was awarded the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize. The jury citation read in part, “The careful, well-crafted, precise and calm responses he has offered to the goals aspired to in his buildings can only originate in a deep and sustained knowledge of the discipline. Yet, those responses are never self-centered, nor do they serve in any way as art for art’s sake: rather, they always remained focused on the higher purpose of the undertaking and on the pursuit of civic and public good”. Chipperfield has worked with many other building types, but his career has clearly been marked by his museum designs – extensions, renovations and entirely new buildings. In the interview that follows, granted to Philip Jodidio in September 2024, he goes beyond the matter of specific buildings to describe a certain number of convictions and working methods. Unexpected, respectful both of context and of users, resolutely modern yet somehow very much anchored in what already exists, Chipperfield today works a good part of the time with his foundation in Galicia (Spain) where he is committed to no less than “trying to rethink the role of the architect”.

Kunsthaus Zürich, Svizzera, 2020 © Noshe, courtesy of David Chipperfield Architects

Philip Jodidio (PJ): Your extension for Kunsthaus Zürich appears at first glance to be an entirely autonomous building.

David Chipperfield (DC): The competition for Kunsthaus Zürich asked for an extension of a certain scale, which meant that a new separate building larger than the existing structure was to be added. From the point of view of the institution, they wanted a certain amount of gallery space and support facilities that the campus did not provide for. Thus, the project had to do with expanding the campus and in that, it was related to the urban condition as well. Set facing the Karl Moser building, the extension is both an autonomous building and also an integral part of the campus, which meant creating some dialog with the Moser building.

PJ: Was the underground passage between the buildings imposed, was it a choice of yours?

DC: It was always a requirement and, in a way, it belies or confirms the notion of extension. We did question many times from a technical and cost standpoint whether we could do without it, but in such an institution there are many good technical reasons for having covered secure links between buildings. So, it does two things. From our perception as members of the public, it gives us the opportunity to go from one building to another in bad weather. But just as important, it allows the museum to move things in a secure way.

PJ: The entrance area of the new building is very generous and high, leading to a monumental staircase. What was your idea in this instance?

DC: Museums at this scale have a problem of orientation and you have a lot of galleries to look at. So, the concept of the building from the beginning, and I would say even embedded in the question, was the presumption of a room-based museum. You can design a museum either as a free-flowing space that then is subdivided, or you can design it as a sequence of rooms which are well-connected. I think both options are enjoyable. This was very much from its inception and from the briefing a museum of rooms of different sizes.

Theoretically flexible museums are a bit of a misnomer because it is extremely expensive to move walls each time. If you look at the configurations that flexible museums are capable of, in the end, there are only a few that work. So, I think the decision to have predominantly a room museum was correct.

But going back to your question, in my opinion, the issue of museums is that you somehow want to get a little bit lost looking at art, you are not looking at architecture, you are looking at art. And at the same time as being lost, you need the security of orientation. I think you need to be able to judge how lost you want to be, and you need to be able to decide at what pace you want to go. There is nothing worse than feeling that you are in something where you have got to rattle through because you do not quite know how much there is to look at.

In that sense, the central hall is doing two things. One is connecting it to the city, so it is creating a public space. You can enter from the garden on the north or you can enter from the square on the south. And similarly, you could simply walk through the building without visiting, which connects the building to the city. Two, once you are in the building, the central hall is a space to which you will always return. It permits you to orientate yourself, and to understand the dimensions of the building.

The Hepworth Wakefield, galleria d’arte, West Yorkshire, Regno Unito, 2011 © Iwan Baan, courtesy of David Chipperfield Architects

PJ: Is that space not about architecture? You said that when you go into a museum, it is to get lost in the art. Here you enter; and it is very much architecture, is it not?

DC: It is certainly at the moment when visitors enter, it is meant to be the most flexible space of the institution, and it invites activity and intervention. It is a public room, which I hope will allow for installations and intrusions at different scales. So ideally, it is also a gallery.

PJ: I met you in Berlin some time ago. You spend a good deal of time there, and your practice is partly installed there. You have engaged in a number of significant projects that have to do with museums. At some point, did you make a conscious decision that museums were an area that you were focusing on, or is this a matter of the circumstances, such as competitions?

DC: I think it is a bit of both. I guess if we had found ourselves doing railway stations, we might find ourselves doing more railway stations, benefiting from knowledge, reputation, and experience. You might eventually become a bit bored with railway stations, but for museums, that is never the case. You are pulled into doing them and you find yourself with repeated offers to do another one. You do not shy away from them because they are very nice commissions.

First of all, you have a certain amount of client protection insofar as the conventional issues of time, money and quality are concerned. Commercial projects are often skewed towards time and money, and quality becomes something that you have to try and hold on to. The clients for museums are a group of people who, while certainly still concerned with cost and time, are more tolerant to ambitions that are not quantifiable in conventional terms. There are clients who are invested in artistic qualities and therefore they can understand discussions that in other situations there might be impatience about.

Secondly, in terms of the basic premise, you are dealing with very elemental things – space, sequence, light, materiality. Museums are in a way architecture stripped of the programmatic requirements that might dominate others like a railway station or a hospital, an office building or a school. The programmatic description is generally quite abstract, a series of rooms that are nice to walk through. Probably apart from a church, museums are the closest you can get to a pure architectural question, which is both good and bad because you can abuse that freedom or that lack of functionality. In other cases, functionality can give you justifications for giving a particular shape or form.

PJ: In the case of Berlin, especially for the Museumsinsel, these are projects that took a great deal of time, I assume because of administrative reasons and the difficulty of the projects. Did that ever lead you to feel that what you had decided in 1997 might not be appropriate ten years later? Is there not a natural evolution in your own approach to the architecture that may be somewhat at odds with the long periods involved in the projects in Berlin?

DC: For the Neues Museum, we did indeed win the competition in 1997, and it was finished 12 years later. Did the decisions we made in 1997 go out of date? In fact, at the time of the competition, we only made one decision, which was that the approach to rebuilding this ruin should be based on the idea that anything that had survived should be protected and it should be embedded in the solution of completion. We determined that we should adopt an approach that is familiar in the restoration of archeological objects or paintings, but that was not necessarily always adopted in the case of architecture. The truth is that we had absolutely no idea how to do it, what it would mean or where it would take us formally.

We did not win with a design; we won with an attitude and a sort of philosophical approach. And that actually survived incredibly well because I think the principle was correct. It was very easy to argue for intellectually, though it was not necessarily easy to argue for emotionally. The Germans, Berliners especially, saw the idea of protecting ruins not only as a positive archeological approach, but possibly a negative emotional approach insofar as this was evidence of horror. I was proposing to keep memories of a bad time and what some would have liked was just to cover it all up. Therefore, I had to argue between what was intellectually correct and what was emotionally understandable. Only in Germany could you have that conversation at such a high and robust level, and I did not see that as a problem.

I actually saw it as being the fundamental energy of the project and therefore totally enjoyable as a legitimate struggle of ideas. It was a dynamic process. The debate internally amongst us, and externally within the community went on in parallel with the emotional and intellectual discussion, but also with the administration from a practical and logistical point of view. And then, there were some museum people who were mainly interested in trying to have space to show objects. This dynamic process went on through the whole evolution of the design. So, in reality, for the Neues Museum, the result was not the conclusion of something that was put in the oven 12 years ago. It was the result of a 12-year process.

The Hepworth Wakefield, galleria d’arte, West Yorkshire, Regno Unito, 2011 © Iwan Baan, courtesy of David Chipperfield Architects

PJ: The James-Simon-Galerie is another case. It is a new building in an environment that appears to limit the introduction of modernity in architectural terms to a space that is fraught, not only with history but with architectural content. Can you tell me a little bit about how you approached the visible design, the exterior to start with, of that building?

DC: Both the Neues Museum (1859) and the Alte Nationalgalerie (1876) were the work of Friedrich August Stüler, who was a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the architect of the Altes Museum (1830). He connected the Nationalgalerie and the Neues Museum with a colonnade, creating the so-called Kolonnadenhof. The colonnade is a device by which these solitaire objects are relocated. He uses a non-building piece of architecture or a non-enclosed piece of architecture to link the complex together. The program of the James-Simon was very ambiguous. It is not a museum, it is a bucket full of requirements, all the things which the Museums Island did not provide within the conventional 19^th century buildings.

PJ: It is a matter of circulation or connection, is it not?

DC: Well, it is connection and program, which was a sort of hodgepodge. We do not have a good auditorium on Museum Island, we need one. We do not have a place for a really good bookshop, we need one. We do not have a very good temporary exhibition space. We do not have a good restaurant anywhere. So that is your shopping list. It is a grocery list and it is not a conventional building program, in a way. It is a response to infrastructure shortfall in the 19^th-century buildings, which do not meet contemporary museum visitor requirements. The James-Simon-Galerie is an ambiguous thing in the sense that it is trying to solve problems, as you say, of circulation, entrance, connection and program. That is a hybrid problem. Stüler used the device of the Kolonnadenhof to connect the Alte Nationalgalerie and Neues Museum as an ensemble around a common space, and that space in turn connected to the Lustgarten. But the Pergamonmuseum (1930) is on the island yet has no connection to it. You have to go off the island, walk north and cross the bridge back onto the island. So, it is like someone sitting in the living room and turning their chair to your back and occupying space right next to you, but refusing to talk to you. And you have got no way of getting in there. Thus, the largest object to the museum island has no apparent connection to the first three buildings. And that causes a problem of infrastructure for the museum complex.

James-Simon-Galerie, Berlino, Germania, 2019 © Simon Menges, courtesy of David Chipperfield Architects

PJ: This is one of the issues that the James-Simon-Galerie addresses?

DC: The question was, could we link them together? And that is why the James-Simon-Galerie had to be a building and not the building, to be a link. Therefore, we adopted the system of the colonnade. The colonnade disguises the ambiguity of the building not being a building and tries to submerge it into creating a place. In terms of architectural language, we took the colonnade and turned it into a stripped-down version of classical architecture. One might say, that has more architectural presence than we would have wanted. You could argue that in a sense, we were trying to not make it disappear as architecture, but we were trying to soften its object quality by making it express the jobs that it had to do as a connector.

PJ: You seem to express some regret or to question the powerful nature of the architectural presence of the James-Simon-Galerie, is that correct?

DC: No, I do not think it is regret. I am saying that clearly any mark takes on resonance and therefore, while we believe that the proposition of the James-Simon-Galerie is determined by its binding together and its unification of issues both logistic, spatial and in terms of placemaking, there is an inevitable second reading of this as an object.

Ristrutturazione del Neues Museum, Berlino, Germania, 2009 © Ute Zscharnt, courtesy of David Chipperfield Architects

PJ: You dealt with an existing building with the war history in Berlin in the case of the Neues Museum, and faced a much different problem with the Neue Nationalgalerie. That project was also a renovation but related to the relatively recent, modernist past.

DC: What to do with buildings of the 1960s or the modern heritage is a question that is frequently asked. If those buildings are not of the top drawer or do not have some iconic status, many are knocked down on the basis that they are technically weak or that they have run their course. Of course, whether or not a building like the Neue Nationalgalerie should be restored or not is not open to question, but there are inherent failings technically that make restoration quite complicated. In the case of Mies, it was extremely complicated because there is no space for forgiveness.

With a 19^th century building, if the insulation is not working, you can probably find some place to pad it out. For the Neue Nationalgalerie, we kept everything, but we did actually have to rebuild certain things using the originals but improving their performance by adding things or thickening things. God may be in the details, but the details were very, very thin. In fact, the detail and the concept are the same thing. The concept of his architecture is deeply embedded in the physical realization, but with the Nationalgalerie those details did not work. He did not include any thermal isolation or cold bridging in the elegant metal extrusions. The reason that Mies’ window frames are so beautiful is because he used pure elements. And for 60 years, the building has been suffering because of an in-built problem, I do not know what they were thinking about at the time, but there is no way that a non-insulated glass façade like that can deal with Berlin winters.

PJ: How did you resolve that very basic problem?

DC: In simple, cut-to-the-chase explanation, if we had upgraded the window frames to current requirements, they would be eight times bigger than the historical ones. So, at one end of the solution spectrum, we could repair and put elements back which does not solve any issues but keeps Mies’ building exactly as it was. At the other end of the spectrum, you would have rebuilt at least three times more than what was there. We spent one year trying to find solutions that everybody could live with. And that was an experience that we had developed on the Neues Museum because on a project like that, it is not the architect somehow banging his fist on the table and saying, “I want it like this”. It is the architect sitting with five different groups of people who all have five different concerns about where the goods elevator might go. The curators want it there, the historians want it there, the conservators want it there, the technicians want it there, and therefore, you actually have to sit in a room and help everybody to understand everybody else’s position and start to come towards a common solution because it does not work when you get a solution and four people in the room are furious. We used the same technique in both the Neues Museum and the Nationalgalerie and therefore, we had to have engineers and representatives from the finance ministry who were paying for this whole thing in the same room as historians, so that we could have a full-blooded discussion about what might be the right technical thing to do and which would be the wrong historical thing to do.

PJ: It sounds like an insoluble problem.

DC: In the end, I have to say, we found a solution that is extremely close to Mies’ original to the point at which we managed to keep every element of the historical building. We treated a 1960s building as if it were a Greek temple. Instead of replacing things, we repaired things. We took 30,000 pieces of the building off, and brought them to workshops, repaired them, and put them back again. It would have been much cheaper to get rid of it. Nothing on the Nationalgalerie could not have been replaced with new, but we decided that philosophically, it was correct to keep everything and where we could keep original paint, we kept original paint. So, we treated the restoration of Mies using the method we had developed in the Neues Museum. And the reason that we could do it was the trust that we had created between us and the administration through the work on Neues Museum.

PJ: But I still believe in the culture of the country that one comes from. So here you are, English after all, and you are dealing with some of the most sensitive and difficult architectural problems that Germany has. Do you feel that being English has anything to do with your success in Germany? Have you had to put aside some of the thoughts you might have had elsewhere to fit in more with the German way of being?

DC: That is an interesting question. Coming from an Anglo-Saxon culture as an architect, you keep fighting so that things can have meaning beyond the practical and financial exception. One must remember that the Berlin of 1997 was different than now. It was an extremely exciting moment where you had the city having to rethink and redefine itself and to reinvent itself. My German friends kept apologizing to me because there were so many demonstrations and articles against the Neues Museum project and questioning about why should we have to keep these memories of the war and “Why cannot Chipperfield just cover them up?”, or “Why cannot we just have Stüler’s building back”?

I kept saying that I found the discussion fantastic. As architects, we argue that architecture is important, and that people should be interested in it. So, once they are interested in it, you cannot say, “But I did not want you to be that interested in it”, and “I did not want you to have that opinion about it”. You get what you asked for. So, I do not have any issue with the discussion.

PJ: You had actually confronted this kind of situation in another case with the Marbach Museum of Modern Literature completed in 2006.

DC: I think we have created a culture of the office which engages these discussions. It did start in some ways with the museum in Marbach because there was a great deal of anxiety that we were building columns. And at some point, I had said, “Because you think it looks fascist?”, and they said, “Yes, exactly”. It was the first time in southern Germany after the war that a sort of semi-classical language had been used again. And probably because I was English, I somehow had cleaned it, let us say... So, I do think that being respectful but being a part of and apart from has given me a sort of special position in Germany. I think it is about trust. I think there is a great power if you can demonstrate your interest in issues and are trustworthy. Conversely, there was a lot of confusion at the beginning of the Neues Museum project because I wanted a collaborative process and I realized because I was not German, that I depended on people around me. I depended on finding a solution, not bringing one. At the beginning, the Germans were very suspicious because they are used to another approach. They said, “Well, he obviously knows what he wants to do, so why does he not just tell us?” And I kept saying, “No, I do not know”.
By the time we got to the end, I think it had been accepted as a very unusual but convincing process. Everybody who was involved in the project, from the museum directors to the city historians, to the city architect, all show you that building with as much affection and ownership as I can. So, I believe in that process, and I think that has helped my position in Germany. I think what I have understood is that architects are generally not trusted, and the most valuable thing you can possibly develop is trust.

PJ: Is this true in Spain where you are spending more time currently?

DC: My center of gravity at the moment is Galicia, where I am working with the local government and with the community. And I would say the only weapon I have there is again, trust. And it is probably the trust of someone from outside who is not contaminated by other agendas. And if you can, put that on the table and actually set aside your conventional position as an architect, which tends to be pushing something. As architects, we always seem to have to tend to push something – “This is my scheme, it is so much better than everybody else’s”. But I find that attitude exhausting and really boring. The goal is to be working in a situation where you are trying to establish the correctness of ideas as opposed to the correctness of your own position. What I learned in Germany, and now I am applying in Galicia in a very different way, is that this way, you have much more power. If you are not pushing something, if you are actually questioning things and trying to ask difficult questions, the answers you find are different from those that you try to impose by yourself.

PJ: What are your goals in Galicia?

DC: I have created a foundation that has precisely to do with a different way of working as an architect. I have been running it for seven years now, funding it myself in the beginning, and we do not have clients in the conventional sense. I have a team of architects, and we work on things that might annoy you as a citizen, the things that no one takes care of. Why is this village ruined by a road running through the middle of it? Why is this happening? And so, we take on these things and, in a way, make them into projects. And we have been doing this for seven years and it is about trying to become an agency for things that fall between responsibilities. And it is also a way of trying to redefine the role of the architect. Instead of working exclusively for investors, you try to find a new way, which is to work for people, citizens, which sounds very obvious and very simple, but is not easy obviously. Interestingly, we have developed relationships with different administrations and again, we have become trustworthy and therefore people come to us and consult us and ask for our involvement. Of course, I am aware that to a certain exent I am leveraging my international reputation locally and using it as a privilege to give me access to ask questions that obviously I could not have done so easily if I were an unknown 35-year-old architect. I am using this position to ask some difficult and often challenging questions, and hopefully also helping to find some answers, too.