15_Ego and Optimism

As we stepped out of the monumental glass box into the cold, windy dusk of February Berlin, Paddy was pouting.

His critique of the Neue Nationalgalerie was sharp. The gist of the argument was this: If this building—one of Mies’ final works—was truly the ultimate refined form of his lifelong search for architectural truth, then perhaps Architecture is not a discipline worth believing in. Because, at the end of the day, the Neue Nationalgalerie is not about space, nor about the art it was meant to hold. It is a monument to Mies, his ego and the homogenizing language of Architecture he inadvertently perpetuated.

And yet, despite this critique, Mies' ego seems, in a way, less manevolent than the one we had observed in Hans Kollhoff. Mies’ project, for all its self-importance, was at least a search. Kollhoff, by contrast, has abandoned the search altogether.

If we look at the Barcelona Pavilion as a proposition– a hypothesis, then we can conclude that it laid out a set of questions that Mies spent the rest of his career refining, testing and iterating. Yes, there might be countless spatial inquiries one could have drawn from the Barcelona Pavilion, but in the end, Mies chose a singular obsession: the column and the corner. It is almost monastic—spending a lifetime refining the articulation of two of the most fundamental architectural elements critical to the formulation of sense of a rational space Architects throughout generations have strived for. There is humility in that. To be so committed to the discipline that the work is not about mere expression, but about iteration.

Refinement as optimism.

If there was nothing to uncover in the future, then why keep looking?

Kollhoff’s project, on the other hand, was an entirely different beast. We were standing in Potsdamerplatz shivering in the frigid Berlin winter, when Hans, unbothered by cold despite being only in a tweed jacket, declared: “the 1920’s US skyscraper architecture was the peak of it all.” This romanticization of an inventive yet socially, economically and politically charged era implies a willful ignorance to the social responsibilities of an Architect. In his search for “a tectonic architecture”, Kolhoff has opted to regress to an image of Architecture revolving around the demonstration of luxury, power and dominance, of a bygone era.

The Kollhoff Tower is, of course, beautiful—immaculately detailed. Yet behind the thinly veiled visage of aesthetics, Kollhoff tower is haunted by its own nostalgia. Falling victim to neoliberalism's innate insecurities and constant need to look back in time for self assurance. The need to appropriate the aesthetics of a bygone era’s ruling elite to continually try and scramble for yet another rung up the social ladder.

Kollhoff’s historicism does not hold space for optimism—only a carefully curated longing for a past that was, itself, a projection of power.

Mies’ Neue Nationalgalerie may have been a failure as a gallery, but it was a failure in pursuit of something. It had conviction about the future. Kollhoff tower, in contrast, represents a type of naive nostalgia. His sentimentality in this context, is not used as a way to learn from the collective memory of the human condition, but instead to maintain a status quo of an idyllic fantasy rooted in the past.

It is anti-optimistic.

- T
13/03/2025