Neues Museum

Since October 17 2009, the Neues Museum has opened its doors to the public once again. Designed by the architect Friedrich August Stüler, this work is key in the history of art, museum and technology in the 19th century and was constructed between 1843 and 1855.

The building suffered severe damage in the Second World War in a series of massive bomb blasts. In the forty years that followed the war ruins were left exposed to the harmful effects of the weather, and exigency measures to safeguard the structure were only undertaken for the first time in the 1980s. On the back of a charged international architectural competition, the British architect David Chipperfield was commissioned to reconstruct the museum building in 1997, with construction work beginning in 2003. The aim was to restore the building (listed as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site since 1999) to its original glory while at the same time taking stringent conservation requirements into account.

The architect met these challenges by brilliantly anchoring the main body of the museum in the architectural language of the present day. The resplendent richness of Stüler's late classicism and historicism is now brought into a charming dialogue with Chipperfield's own strict language of forms. The lost rooms and sections of the building have been structurally rebuilt, without being mere copies of the historical original. The facades and interior spaces have been carefully preserved in the restoration work, with respect paid to the visible traces of the events of the past on the memorial building in the process.

The museum now unites three of the National Museums in Berlin's major collections under one roof. The various collections are not merely brought together in the Neues Museum in terms of their location, they also relate to one another in terms of their content. This presentation of the testaments of material culture and written sources, spanning several collections at once, traces the development of Old World cultures from prehistory and early history, from the Near East to the Atlantic, from North Africa to Scandinavia and is without parallel for its depth and richness.

Children under 18 are free of charge!