Great Walls I Have Known

Troy, Jerico, China, Hadrian, Berlin, plus of course Colditz and Shawshank; real and mythical, but conceptually and functionally closing the circle, ran around seven times. The beauty of the Berlin Wall lies in it's 20th Century procurement strategy; built in just one night (but with meticulous planning); first with humans, then with fence, then with prefabricated concrete pieces that culminate in that particular cross-section; angled at the foot to be able to stand without foundation, and topped with a semi circular capping to obscure it's thinness (and presumably counter the grappling iron). It was faced on the one side with the graffiti of freedom, and one the other by the killing zone, and brought down, in just one night, not just by a hoard of people, but by a media that had chivvied away at it for years, so now you might piss against in a Las Vegas casino.

Of course there was not just one wall, but a whole fence along the boundary with old Eastern Europe; fascinating (just as with Hadrian's) for where it marched in to the sea. The edges of walls are the problem; the going round and the going over and the going under, but this is something architecture enjoys sometimes for it's own sake, think Le Corbusier at Jaoul, where walls are clear planes, and where he specified that a different bricklayer should be used every three courses to provide added rusticity (stick that up your phenomenological pipe and smoke it). But historically we have been brought in to merely glamourise holes.
When is a wall a wall? I suspect Trump's wall will not be, it will be an object of myth and consternation, and as the USA reverts to being one big farmstead, we might recall Robert Frost's poem. If you don't know the poem it's called 'Mending a Wall'.

Patrik's Mies Extension

This is a proposed extension to Mies' New National Gallery Berlin by one Patrik Schumacher. Obviously, I'm aghast.
I'm also highly amused, because when you take on giants you tend to have to tread carefully, and this is not something Patrik is known for, especially recently. But here, and to our great surprise, we are offered an obvious contextualism, a distinct tipping of the cap.
All good, you might say, but look again, something looks wrong, what is it?
I think what is wrong is doing it in the first place. The New National Gallery famously doesn't work at all as a gallery, and that, you might say, wearing a particularly sophisticated hat, is it's entire point. So why on earth would you want to extend it?
This might be the first question for the architect to ask the no doubt fraught authorities who try and run the damn thing, utilising their full gamut of conceptual armour, experience and worldly knowledge, if they had been foolish enough to accept the commission in the first place. But this is something else, this, I understand, is a competition; you choose to enter in, to take on the quest, you are choosing to make a fool of yourself unless you really believe you can do it. So the problem is like that of Achilles, sitting under his long black ships on the beach, wondering if he should join the battle, and sitting there for a long time weighing it up, consulting the gods, whatever. Even Achilles had to think about not for a very long time.
 'Not on your nelly' would be the conventional mortal's response.
After long consideration (perhaps twenty five years in my case) of this building that encourages my own bowel movements, it is my view that the only thing you might just do with NNG is improve the bar.