New National Gallery

This guide to the New National Gallery in Berlin traces its roof back to an unbuilt office tower architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed for the Bacardi rum company in Cuba, shelved when revolution swept the country in the late 1950s. It follows how Berlin offered the aging architect a museum built around that discarded design, and the tense 1967 day when engineers hydraulically raised the massive steel roof into place. Look up at the roof and count the eight slim columns holding it up from outside the glass walls.