Doctor Watson Architects Incomplete Works Volume Two

This volume returns to Mies' New National Gallery in Berlin. The first volume included a short, introductory section on the NNG, but it merely skimmed the surface of what was in truth an intense preoccupation with that building. DWA were fascinated by the NNG because it seemed to be Mies' most convincing demonstration of what it might mean to set the grid free. For them, the NNG had the same unique aura as Malevich's painting of the Black Square and they came to regard it as the point zero through which they must pass if they were to escape the presuppositions of professional architecture and the social demands connected with it. For DWA, conceiving and producing AIR Grid structures based on the order of the NNG became a means of escape, freeing them 'from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature'.