The New National Gallery was the first Mies van der Rohe building that I saw up close.
It was 1981 and I had come to Berlin from London after finishing second in the Schinkel Prize.
When I walked around this building in the middle of winter, in the old western part of Berlin, only a few hundred meters from the wall, it made an enormous impression on me.
Architects love competition. From a conventional perspective, they want to leave their mark. But with the restoration of the Neue Nationalgalerie, which began in 2012, it wasn't important to present a design. Sometimes it is important that architects realize what not to do and that they prevent certain things from happening.