If you were trying to let the Neues Museum as a private apartment, every potential new tenant who came to take a look at it would complain that it was in a dreadful state. Several layers of flaking, cracking plaster, unfaced masonry, scorch marks, bullet holes – and everywhere evidence of water damage and decrepitude. “In acute need of renovation” would be the diagnosis any self-respecting German craftsman would make. Not so on Berlin’s Museum Island: this is what the building looks like after renovation. For, unlike what you would want in your own home, these “deficiencies” in the 150-year-old building have a specific purpose: to highlight traces of a moving history that tells of idealism and destruction, science and national blindness. David Chipperfield’s convincing suggestion – that this story must not be covered up but told – won the British architect the contract in 1997 to transform the remains of Friedrich August Stüler’s war-ruin back into a complete museum. Prussia, the German Empire, National Socialism, the GDR, the globalized present – all have left their mark on this neoclassical building. Now that it has been conserved, the Neues Museum, which was reopened by Chancellor Angela Merkel on 16 October after standing empty for 70 years, has become a great architectural novel about the common destinies of culture and nation. For, in this building, the presence of meaning can be felt everywhere; there is cultural history and symbolism in every speck of colour.
Caryatids and ionic columns, tympanum and arcades: the elements of Stüler’s design that survived the bombing of the Second World War and partial demolition in the 1950s eloquently tell of Prussia’s desire to present itself as an educated civil society based on the models of Antiquity. By contrast, in the Vaterländischer Saal, the “Hall of the Fatherland”, wall portraits of war gods and valkyries bear witness to the influence that Germanic ideas of heroism still had as late as the 19th century. The ubiquitous scars left by incendiary bombs and shrapnel and the evidence of the neglect inflicted on the Prussian heritage during the GDR years add many further vivid chapters to this architectural novel. However, Chipperfield, a custodian of classic modernism, has not only created a backdrop for history using its colourful material remains, but has cautiously and soberly re-interpreted it in all the places where the original structure has been lost. He has recreated the destroyed section of the north wing and Stüler’s colossal central staircase in the same proportions, but not in the same architectural language. The newly built sections are abstract, freed of ornaments, reduced to structure and materiality. This matter-of-fact language of concrete and light grey terrazzo, and the reddish brick walls with which Chipperfield has replaced the lost elements, create a relatively undistorted spatial impression. Yet beyond this it also provides something that a historical reconstruction of Stüler’s architecture would not have achieved: they give the museum a healthy balance between diversity and severity.
There is probably no other museum in the world with such a lavish abundance of different textures. Stüler’s many architectural quotations, the great range of room solutions from crypt-like barrel vaults to imperial halls which he had designed, plus the vivid colours of the surviving exhibition rooms and the moving remains of the wall-paintings together evoke constantly changing moods. However, the conservation of historical traces, the wild and motley bareness of many formerly plastered parts of the building, and the bizarre patterns of plaster and material remains would, at some point, probably have led to an overstimulation of the atmosphere in the Neues Museum over four floors. Chipperfield therefore cools things down and achieves the necessary composure by limiting himself to the simplest solutions wherever completely destroyed sections have had to be replaced by new construction.
Walking through the four floors and two wings of the Neues Museum, visitors are therefore constantly switching back and forth between the old sections, with their ruinous and sinister charm, and the new, geometric and light-flooded noblesse of the new. For example, on leaving Stüler’s dark domed hall – at the centre of which the theatrically illuminated bust of Nefertiti displays its ideal proportions – visitors next enter halls structured with angular, light-coloured concrete beams and the large plateau which Chipperfield has placed into the Egyptian Court. Here, busts and sculptures of Egypt are presented amidst the cold triad of modernity – steel, glass and concrete. Yet this actually tends to reinforce their sensuality.
Today, the museum houses diverse aspects of early history. One focus is the Egyptian collection; its portrait gallery in particular, with exhibits from over 30 centuries, dispels the common prejudice that ancient Egyptian depictions of people are stereotyped. The Neues Museum also covers subjects as diverse as mass migration and Neanderthals, gods and coffins, the Stone Age and Rome, Slavs and Germans. Using varied forms of presentation, the Neues Museum brings together gladiator helmets and hand axes, Greek philosophers and grinning masks, but also lumps of glass beads melted by the incendiary bombs. In addition to Nefertiti and the remains of Schliemann’s excavations of Troy, there are various other sensational archaeological discoveries spread throughout the building: the Xanten boy (a dumb waiter for Roman feasts salvaged from the River Rhine), the Gold Hat with astronomical tables that was worn 3,000 years ago in southern Germany, or the colossal statue of the Greek sun god Helios.
The latter stands in what is perhaps the most beautiful, albeit also very intimate room that Chipperfield created to replace destroyed sections of the building. For the lost Southern Domed Hall, Chipperfield had a new dome built up, made of thin, dark bricks, which evolves upwards from a square base to a circular vault with a blue lantern. From here, the naked God stares through the entire museum to the old Northern Domed Hall, where Nefertiti returns his stare, trapped in this eternal flirtation. And this exciting narrative of opposition seems to complete the whole beautiful composition of this new New Museum.
In the past, David Chipperfield’s subdued architecture and his pragmatism have not always led to buildings that developed charm via their angularity. But the 12-year battle to find a form of coexistence between abstraction and the traces of time in the Neues Museum has led to something very special. Although his proposals were reviled by a strong lobby insisting that war-damaged buildings in Berlin should be reconstructed in a way that is true to the original, Chipperfield consistently pursued his concept of combining several objectives in one building. And the result is unequivocally more historical than historical reconstruction. For it is the fusion of the building and the exhibition that forges a human link between the mammoth hunter and the modern information collector and makes the Neues Museum a truly universal history museum – and does so in such a charming way that not even our self-respecting craftsman will see any further need for renovation.
