This book documents David Chipperfield's most important project to date: the Neues Museum, centerpiece of the Berlin Museumsinsel. Photographs taken in natural light by Candida Hofer show the rooms after their completion and before they were furnished. Hofer's images are complemented by texts from well-known architects, architectural historians, art historians and conservation architects highlighting the fundamental principles of the project. An interview with David Chipperfield gives insight into the problems surrounding the work.

"As architects," writes David Chipperfield, "we must both be part of and stand apart from the culture within which we operate. To be effective we must embrace power but also distance ourselves, we must engage in dialogue and we must refuse to listen, we must explore the familiar and the unfamiliar, we must embrace history and reject it. Finally we must resolve our ideas in matter and form." This publication was initiated and designed by the architect, who, in four sections, writes on form, language, composition and materiality. His choice of images, including architectural sketches and drawings, help to make this a personal notebook that documents the resolution and realization of formal ideas from his own viewpoint. Also featuring plans and illustrations of built and unbuilt projects, it explores the relationship between form and matter, both theoretically and practically.

Of the new generation of architects practicing today in Britain under the rubric neo-minimalists, none has a higher critical reputation than David Chipperfield. As his fame and commissions have grown worldwide, Chipperfield now find himself in the circle of elite architects, including Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor, whose reputations have been built on an architecture of spare sensuousness.
Chipperfields London-based practice has recently garnered a large number of prestigious projects, among them the reconstruction of the Neues Museum and master plan of the Museum Island in Berlin. His River and Rowing museum on the Thames has been hailed as a minor masterpiece, a match of modern manners and time-honored materials and won the Building of the Year Award from the Royal Fine Art Commission.
The projects covered in this large-format, beautifully produced book include: airframe furniture; BFI Film Centre, London; the Figge Arts Center in Davenport, Illinois; the Royal Collections Museum in Madrid; the Toyota Auto building in Kyoto; and the San Michele Cemetery in Venice, among many others. Stunning photographs, and Chipperfields preparatory sketches and countless drawings illustrate this exquisite work.