First look: Chipperfield’s Neues Museum

The Architechts' Journal (Roz Bulleid)

Here are the first pictures of the finished Neues Museum in Berlin, newly restored by David Chipperfield Architects and Julian Harrap Architects

The £49 million rennovation – one of the most prestigious restoration projects in Europe – has succeeded despite funding problems and local complaints. It has been 12 years since Stirling Prize-winner Chipperfield was commissioned to masterplan the area.

Completed in 1849, the building on Museum Island in the heart of former East Berlin was bombed in the Second World War and spent much of the 20th century as a crumbling shell.

Chipperfield has rebuilt the missing north-west wing and a bay to the south east. The courtyard spaces and staircases have been restored in a way that preserves a sense of the building’s decay.

The 20,500m sq museum will house Egyptian antiquities when it opens later this year, as it did before the war.

See the above page to see the before and after photographs.

There's a more detailed description and over view on the Financial Times website, minus the photographs.

There was a huge amount of interest, with 30,000 people visiting the site in three days last September. Chipperfield is keen to contrast this civic engagement with the apathy in his home country. The process, which saw the designs toned down, was painful but the German people, their press and their politicians are deeply involved in their public buildings. The result is spectacular.

Outside, the rebuilt parts of the structure are expressed in brick and smeared with a creamy slurry so that their texture doesn’t jar with the stone – yet they remain obviously apart. This approach has been followed through inside, with a meticulousness that shows why this huge undertaking has lasted 11 years. Chipperfield points out that it was a building of “millions of decisions”; as there could be no blanket approach, the work involved a painstaking analysis of every surface and detail, decisions about what could be saved, what must be rebuilt and how to distinguish between old and new.

In places it resembles the faded Parisian decadence of Peter Brook’s resonantly faded music hall Bouffes du Nord; in the Roman rooms the patched-up reds of the walls and the damaged frescoes evoke Pompeii itself. The museum itself becomes the archaeology, layering story on story and rooting the antiquities in this tiny Prussian island through a shared history of destruction and place. In the stunning staircase hall, where Chipperfield’s monumental newly inserted stair leads operatically upwards in a sweep of light, the fire-damaged and weathered Ionic columns begin to resemble the very artefacts they originally copied.

The Egyptian rooms were judged, even in the 1920s, to be over the top, and their rich hieroglyphic wall paintings were erased in favour of the now ubiquitous modernist white box, here compounded by an oddly cheapskate scheme of painted-on fake timber panelling. The restoration reveals both a frieze of exuberant historicist fakery (which survived above a suspended ceiling) and the overlaying of clinical whiteness. Embedded in this one, captivating room is the whole history of the museum – from being a place of wonder to a place of detached analysis, to a cultural repository in which artefact is inseparable from context.

See the above page for the full story.