![[rss]](http://onmuseums.com/wp-content/themes/k2_1.0.3/images/feed.png)
From Dezeen…
Fredrich August Stueler’s 1859 Neues Museum, located on Museum Island in the heart of the former East Berlin, was initially constructed to extend the space of the Altes Museum, built immediately to the south by Stueler’s teacher, Karl Fredrich Schinkel.
The original design had formed part of an overall architectural concept for Museum Island – prompted by Fredrich Wilhelm IV – of a series of art and archaeological museums styled so as to promote a greater appreciation of classical antiquity.
Among these museums, and in terms of its construction and rich interior decoration, the Neues Museum was considered the most important monumental Prussian building of its era.
Seen today alongside the four other reconstructed museum buildings on the island, Stueler’s Neues Museum is the only structure still ruined from the war – a contrast that demonstrates ideas of history and decay in a compelling and powerful way, although throughout the building the degree of destruction varies greatly.
Certain interiors have survived almost completely, with elaborate finishes and ceiling frescoes still intact, while other building elements exist only as the enclosures of a gaping void. The power of the ruin not least stems from this exposed brickwork shell, investing the building, 150 years after it was first imagined, with the indelible presence of a picturesque classical ruin. More…
