Ethnographic

The Neues Museum, located north of (behind) the Altes Museum on Berlin's Museum Island (a World Heritage Site), was built between 1843 and 1855 according to plans by Friedrich August Stüler, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. more...

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The museum was partly destroyed in World War II (in some areas, only the outer walls remained) and is currently being rebuilt. The reconstruction is scheduled to be completed in 2009, after which the museum will exhibit the Egyptian and Pre- and Early History Collections, as it did before the war. Among the treasures shown will be the famous bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

Both as a part of the Museum Island complex, and as an individual building, the museum testifies to the neoclassical architecture of museums in the 19th century. With its new industrialized building procedures and its use of iron construction, the museum plays an important role in the history of technology.

Since the classical and ornate interiors of the Glyptothek and of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich were destroyed in World War II, the partly destroyed interior of the Neues Museum ranks among the last remaining examples of interior museum layout of this period in Germany.

Overview

The Neues Museum (literally New Museum) was the second museum on the Museum Island and was built as an extension to house the collections which could not be accommodated in the Altes Museum (literally Old Museum). These were the collections of plaster casts, the Egyptian museum, the prehistoric and early historic collections (Museum der vaterländischen Altertümer), the ethnographic collection, and the collection of etchings and engravings (Kupferstichkabinett). It is thus the \"original source\" of the collections in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Although originally conceived as a general museum with a permanent collection, the \"outsourcing\" of individual collections, such as the ethnography collection, into separate museums illustrates the historical change from a general museum to a specialized one. This is a general development of most museums in the course of the 19th century.

Moreover, the Neues Museum is an important monument in the history of construction and technology. With its various iron constructions, it is the first monumental building of Prussia to consistently apply new techniques made possible by industrialization. As a further innovation, a steam engine was used for the first time in construction in Berlin. Among other things, it was used to ram pilings into the building ground. The soft, spongy soil around the River Spree requires buildings in the central area of Berlin to be anchored deep.

History

Construction

Construction of the Neues Museum began on 19 June 1841, under the auspices of a committee established by Frederick William IV, which included the curator of the Royal Museums, Ignaz von Wolfers, as well as Friedrich August Stüler. The king, with his cabinet, had already ordered that the construction project be assigned to Stüler on 8 March 1841. The poor quality of the ground at the building site became apparent quickly, when the workers discovered deposits of diatomaceous earth just below the surface. Therefore a pile structure was necessary under the whole building, consisting of 2344 wooden foundation piles between 6.9 and 18.2 meters long. To ram the piles in, a five-horsepower (3.7 kW) steam engine was used, whose power could be increased if necessary to 10 HP (7.5 kW). It drove the pumps that drained of the building site, the elevators, and the mortar mixing machines. The newsletter of the Berlin Architecture Association reported on the building site and the new technical devices.

Read more at Wikipedia.org