Augustus II, Elector of Saxony(1670-1733), earned his epithet—"The Strong"—for a number of distinctions: He could break a horseshoe bare-handed; he is said to have sired a bastard for every day of the year (one of whom, the French general Maurice de Saxe, was the great-grandfather of George Sand); and he guilefully maneuvered his regal bulk—some 250 pounds—onto the throne of Poland. Having toured France as a prince, the elector modeled his reign and court on those of Louis XIV, and with the riches generated by his silver mines, he transformed his capital, Dresden, into a Baroque jewel—a German Versailles.
There have been few more avid—indeed ravenous—collectors than Augustus, though his greatest obsession was with porcelain. He once traded 600 mercenaries to the king of Prussia for 151 pieces of Kangxi blue-and-white. At his death, the vaults of his Zwinger Palace contained some 20,000 examples of the Chinese and Japanese potter's highest art, and no one since has come remotely close to amassing an equal treasure. Yet Augustus wasn't content merely to acquire: He dreamed of discovering the closely guarded Asian secrets of porcelain's hardness and translucence. The court alchemist, Johann Friedrich Bttger, was a motivated researcher. (He had served some dungeon time for failing to turn dross into gold.) After much experiment, Bttger, along with Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus, succeeded in finding the right clay (kaolin) and in building a kiln capable of firing it at extreme heat. Thus Europe's first china—Meissen—was born.
Peter Marino is the architect of choice for modern Sun Kings. One suspects that Augustus would have admired Marino's signature biker's gear: the aesthete as muscle-man. Palatial private residences are only a small part of a practice that has made Marino one of the world's most sought-after designers of deluxe retail spaces, civic monuments, hotels, corporate headquarters and condominiums. Five years ago, however, when he received a phone call from Dr. Martin Roth, the director of Germany's State Art Collections in Dresden, inviting him to create a new gallery at the Zwinger Palace compound for the elector's Oriental porcelain collection, Marino thought it was a prank—an old school friend putting on an accent to tease him with his dream commission. "It seemed impossible," he explains, "that the Germans would choose an American to design a museum in Dresden"—a city that the Allies had obliterated with two infamous days of firebombing in 1945. "Those raids not only killed tens of thousands of civilians, they destroyed Dresden's glorious architectural patrimony. The only bright note is that two weeks before the Zwinger was leveled, Russian troops crated the porcelain and shipped it to Moscow. And in the 1950s Khrushchev shipped it back again."
Communist Dresden lay more or less in ruins until the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989. Even then, the city and its surrounding countryside were a blighted and depressed zone. In the 1990s, partly in an effort to revive the economy through tourism, the new government undertook an ambitious program to rebuild the Baroque landmarks using stone salvaged from the rubble. So the Zwinger was resurrected, but it wasn't until the Elbe River overran its banks, in 2002, that museum officials decided to give the fabulous crockery in their flooded basements a worthier home. Marino's name, Roth told him, was high on everyone's list. Not only was he practically unique among modern architects in being a passionate collector of antique porcelain, he possessed the charisma necessary to make a specialty museum into a glamorous destination for the general public.
Marino's Oriental Gallery at the Zwinger opened in October. It occupies a grandly proportioned orangery shaped like a horseshoe, with arched windows facing a formal garden. Historical preservationists had originally insisted on a "faithful" reproduction of Zacharias Longuelune's early-18th-century designs for the original setting of the collection—a pavilion known as the Japanese Palace. But Marino strenuously demurred, arguing that historical "fidelity" had already been compromised—"by electricity, for example," he says. "I wanted to make the past real and alive for people today, which can't be done with a Disneyland copy. In their time, the porcelains (all new, of course) were crowded together in a floor-to-ceiling display whose object was to awe a visitor with the monarch's wealth and splendor. But that approach is numbing to a modern eye. You have to pace an exhibition like a piece of music, varying the tempo and intensity from movement to movement."
Marino's strategy, he says, was to create "a vital dialogue between contemporary and historical notions of presenting a priceless collection. I set out to educate museum-goers about the Augustan style by giving them a heady dose of it, then supplying a Zen antidote." The gallery is a long, curved arcade punctuated by columned and vaulted bays. In the Baroque galleries in the central section, he installed elaborately fluted and gilded pilasters. He hung their niches with an apricot silk damask handwoven in Lyon from a 17th-century sample in his own textile archives. Delicate examples of Kangxi blue-and-white—plates, teacups and small vases—are displayed in lavish profusion on gilt brackets. Large planters sit on the stone floor, while jars or figures are massed on ornate consoles, some original to the Dresden court.
A second group of Baroque galleries, in the elbow of the horseshoe, is devoted to Imari ware and famille verte, and here Marino replaced the silk with panels of a vibrant, Heian-red lacquer that mirror the arched windows, which in turn mirror the voluptuous convexity of the jars. "But in between," he explains, "I wanted the visitor to cleanse his palate of the opulence. The two Zen galleries are devoid of gilt and clutter. Their anthracite-lacquered walls have the cool shimmer of modernity. A few choice pieces float on almost invisible glass bases, inviting contemplation. And that's my statement about how I think porcelain should be appreciated. Take a breath and look softly, for a long while, at the beauty of its surface: You get lost in its depth."