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Dutch architect Braaksma & Roos's intelligent and sensitive restoration of Hendrik Berlage's Gemeentemuseum clarifies the connection between art, architecture, and people. By Joseph Giovannini
The Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, Holland-a state museum of modern art housed in Dutch architect Hendrik Berlage's last building-was unfairly exiled from architectural history after its completion in 1935, a victim of bad timing and anachronistic interpretation. When it opened, De Stijl avant-gardists complained that the concreteframe museum-its central massing and interiors influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple-was not modern enough. Traditionalists found the asymmetrical, factory-inspired design of the galleries too modern: In their eyes, a truly civic museum needed classical posturemonumentalized symmetry, axes, and rhetoric.
After operating for about six years, the museum closed during World War II and suffered bomb damage. After the war, the building was unsympathetically restored, mostly because of persistent material shortages. Through the 1970s, successive directors neutralized its character, recasting it as a white-walled contemporary art gallery with suppressed details. Only in 1985 did the perception of this masterwork change when the director ofthe museum,Theo van Velzen, listed the building on the museum's inventory of art holdings.
But by that date, time and misuse had further compromised the structure. Many of the windows in a museum that was once a tour de force of natural lighting had been walled over to increase display space. The roof, skylight, and brick exterior needed repairs, and the climate control systems needed updating. Insulation was insufficient. Offices for an expanding staff had nibbled away at the galleries, altering Berlage's circulation system, and the museum needed additional exhibition space for new programs-especially galleries for one of the world's largest costume collections. The combination of deferred maintenance and new programs necessitated a building-wide overhaul, not patching, and given the building's new status as a designated work of art, the overhaul meant a thorough restoration requiring a substantial budget. The Hague architectural firm Braaksma & Roos started the restoration in 1995 and completed it in late 1998 at a cost of $25.3 million-about $10 million less than the price recently paid for artist Piet Mondrian's Broadway BoogieWoogie, now permanently on display in the museum.
A new typology
When it was built, the Gemeentemuseum may have fallen between stylistic camps. But...