William Thirteen uncovers the history of the Martin-Gropius-Bau and its prolific architect…
Ask a travel agent or tourist board to rattle off the top five attractions of our fair city and near the top of the list will be Berlin’s thriving art scene and dense thicket of cultural institutions.
Gallons of ink have been spilled over the theme, so much so that the “Berlin Gallery Glut” feature has now become a bi-annual staple of such renowned rags as the NY Times and the Washington Post (often penned by a stringer just settling into their new Friedrichshain flat).
It’s all true, of course, since along with our monthly mushroom crop of pop-up art happenings, temporary exhibition spaces and countless actual galleries, Berlin boasts some of the world finest museums.
A short list might include the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Neues, Altes and Pergamon Museums, as well as the Bröhan Museum, the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection and the Martin-Gropius-Bau. And don’t even get me started on the private collections.
But it wasn’t always this way. Before the Iron Chancellor finally welded Germany together in 1871, Berlin wasn’t a capital, just the sleepy royal seat of Prussia, famed more for the number of its generals than that of its artists. But after Bismarck’s accomplishment, Berlin was the Hauptstadt of a united Germany and a frenzy of urban development swiftly transformed the once sleepy ‘Rezidenzstadt’ into a bustling, modern European metropolis.
This rush to ‘Weltstadt’ was accompanied by an anxiety among the solons of the new capital to establish those cultural institutions long a feature of older European capitals. Never one to miss a chance to demonstrate his beneficence, Kaiser Wilhelm I commissioned Berlin architect Martin Gropius to design a fitting building in which to exhibit his recently acquired German Craft Museum, humbly rechristened as the Royal Museum of Applied Arts.
Martin Gropius, one of Grunderzeit Berlin’s most prolific architects, came to his profession in the cradle. Born into a prestigious local family he numbered among his kin such luminaries as CW Gropius, who studied under Karl Friedrich Schinkel and painted landscapes for the Royal Theater, as well as Ferdinand & George, the ‘Brothers Gropius’, who entertained a generation of Berliners in their …