Losing face

Coloured etching of the Altes Museum, by Friedrich Alexander Thielen, 1830, Museumsinsel, Berlin

In view of this preliminary transformation, the Stirling Staatsgalerie might be said to be already a second-degree version of the Schinkel prototype, operating on Schinkel by way of his modernist re-interpretation. One might extend Rowe’s comment logically to read a “palace of Assembly without a facade.” this Stirling’s central circular volume would be at once a memory of the Pantheon rotunda and of an empty assembly hall; the ramp would already be included in the elements of the project; the three-sided U of offices already subsituted for the courtyard parti; the entrance already off center, and most importantly, the rear wall of the “stoa” already eroded into a screen.

Schinkel's Altes Museum plan

Such formal transformation was, as we have noted, however, already present in Musée Mondial where Le Corbusier retained a reference to Schinkel in plan while entirely reformulating the type in section. The first-floor plan of the Corbusian museum is, indeed, uncannily similar to Stirling’s own reformulation of the Schinkel. In both, a U-shaped blockframes acentral circle; in both, the original dome of the pantheon has been lifted: in the cas df the Musée Mondial, Le Corbusier has substituted the inner space of a high ppyramid; in that of the taatsgalerie, Stirling has completed its ruination, opening it to the sky. Le Corbusier himself made the point that, with the entire monument raised up on pilotis, the distinction between front and back had been erased, thus beginning the process that Stirling accomplishes bu means of the continuous public route through the site from top to bottom. In this sense, Stirling would not simply be destroying the Pantheon, or attacking Schinkel’s monumental version of history, but also gentlry criticizing the idealistic and quasi-mystical aspiration of Corbusian modernism.
In both Schinkel and Le Corbusier, as we have noted, architecture is indissolubly bound to the contents, real and ideological, of the museum. In the altes Museum, the sequence of rooms that assemble the schools of western painting in chronological order is posed against the calm Pantheon at the center that establishes the notion of ahistorical permanence; the public, semipermeable face of the stoa confirms the museum’s connection to the city. Architecture operates as both representation and instruument of the display of a nation’s history and its artistic heritage as the active ingredient of continuing cultural development. It is at once sign and agent of a living history.
Similarly, in Le Corbusier Musée Mondial, the grand route of time is extended back to prehistory and forward to the ever-expanding present, working on insert temporality and spatiality across cultures and peoples into a universalizing frame that, again, proposes history (enlarged in its scope by the sciences of anthropology, ethnology, and geology) as the foundation of the future. the central volume, or “Sacrarium”, universalizes the western Pantheon and acts again as a center for atemporality. Here too the architecture operates as a symbol and mechanism and its tied to its contents.

in The architectural uncanny, Anthony Vidler, 1992, MIT Press