The Elbert Files: Three transparent gems

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When I read about the recent renovation of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalarie art museum, it brought to mind three downtown Des Moines buildings – each is an architectural jewel, and all can be seen during a 10-minute walk along Grand Avenue.

The buildings are the Catholic Pastoral Center at 601 Grand Ave, which opened in 1962 as the headquarters of Home Federal Savings and Loan; the Des Moines Public Library at 10th Street and Grand Avenue, which opened in 2006; and the Krause Gateway Center at 1459 Grand Ave., which opened in 2018.

Each was designed by a world-famous architect, and as a group they tell a story about the evolution of building transparency over the past 60 years.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is perhaps the best known of the three architects responsible for the buildings.

Mies was German-born and emigrated to the United States in 1937, where he helped establish modernism as an architectural style that uses steel and glass to create transparency in buildings as varied as skyscrapers and single-story residences.

Mies designed two buildings in Des Moines, the Home Federal office and Drake University’s Meredith Hall (1965).

In the late 1950s, Home Federal President Jonathan Fletcher and bank director Joseph Chamberlain traveled the country to view projects and interview architects. The building that most impressed them, according to a 2018 Des Moines Register op-ed article by Jennifer Irsfeld James and Claudia Cackler, was Mies’ Seagram Building in New York, a 38-story, bronze and glass tower completed in 1958.

They admired the open feel of the building and asked the famous architect to create something similar for Des Moines, which Mies did.

Like the Seagram Building, the three-story Home Federal office sits on a plaza that is enhanced by a recessed first floor and tinted glass curtains that show off interior spaces.

“The materials seamlessly flow from exteriors to interior spaces, with all aspects carefully aligned on a Miesian grid,” wrote James and Cackler.

The grid is replicated in other Mies buildings, including Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the last building before he died in 1969.

When it was time to renovate Mies’ Berlin gallery, the museum hired British architect David Chipperfield, who also designed Des Moines’ unique downtown public library.

Chipperfield’s goal in Des Moines had been to “break down the threshold between people inside and outside the building.”

Because the new library is in Western Gateway Park, Chipperfield proposed a low-slung, organic form with no definitive front or back. The result is a two-story building that meanders across two city blocks.

Using new technology, Chipperfield achieved a level of transparency that would have made Mies jealous. The library is sheathed in a glass curtain embedded with copper that reflects daylight. But once the sun sets, the glass becomes transparent and passersby can view activity inside the library.

Chipperfield’s later work on the Berlin art museum also allowed him to improve Mies’ mid-20th-century design with new technology. For example, “all of the single-paned glass panels [were] swapped out for dual-paned panels,” according to a Wall Street Journal article.

Mies excelled at concealing support systems. That’s why structures like the Seagram and Home Federal buildings, but especially the Neue Nationalgalerie, are cantilevered and appear to float above their first floors.

Which brings us to the Krause Gateway Center, a building that Italian architect Renzo Piano said was designed “to fly.”

And it does, or at least it seems to fly, because Piano’s design includes layered, offset roofs and tall, wide glass panels. In fact, 85% of exterior walls are glass panels.

Many conference rooms also have glass walls, allowing unobstructed views all the way through the building.

To give the six-story, 159,000-square-foot building the appearance of floating, Piano hid steel supports and used massive cables to hold the cantilevered and unaligned floors in space.

Piano’s design is a logical extension of the transparency Mies brought to Des Moines six decades earlier and eight blocks to the east.