MvDR

God is in the details

Morning at the Neues Nationalgallerie, Berlin. My first Van der Rohe building. A visit that was made extra special by the fact that it was hosting a pretty good Surrealist exhibition. I like how the whole building and although it is made largely of steel and concrete, it had a light air to it. A good building should be a meeting point, not just for people but of ideas, culture and its surroundings. A good building is one that is designed in context. Although not entirely on point, Alain de Botton did shed some insight into what makes a good building or in this case a good hotel:

"A good hotel is an embodiment of the act of love: love understood as a commitment to the wholehearted care of another human being. The ideal hotel would for a time manage to satisfy with the utmost intelligence, all the needs, physical as well as mental, of its clientele... As for architecture, too many hotels still fail to understand how human beings actually function... The failure of hotel designers to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad design is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of architecture. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendency that in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us..."
~ Alain de Botton, Essay 01, Monocle, February 2010