This is the Georg Kolbe Museum, a sort of rom-prag wet dream of a compound. Mies selected a Kolbe for the Barcelona Pavilion, and he was a very successful artist of the inter-war years. His house and studio sit very close to the Berlin unite (see below) as a lovely, or sinister - depending on how you look at it - example of leafy modern, by which I mean lots of lovely hand-made brick brick wall, with discrete window frames in grey, with fir trees growing unfeasibly close, and in this case, either statues of kids leaping about (nymphs) or adults drowned in sorrow amidst the whole lot. Architects the ilk of Caruso St John and Sergison Bates would all love it, but I found myself worrying about the tree roots.
Nearby is a cemetery, and it would make a good cemetery, cemeteries are pretty profound places here for obvious reasons. As it is they've taken most of the Kolbes out of the interior and installed a fabulous collection of really terrible contemporary German art, all of which is supposed to be 'site specific' no doubt, but looks like arbitrary splashes and daubs and piles of rubbish.
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