Royal palace museum reaches milestone
Print Edition
THE German capital on Friday celebrated a milestone in the rebuilding of its Prussian-era royal palace that is set to house a world history museum billed as the country’s top cultural project.
From 2019, the “Berliner Stadtschloss” or Berlin City Palace replica will be the home of the Humboldt Forum global collection, to be curated by the British Museum’s outgoing chief Neil MacGregor, dubbed by local media as the “pop star of the museum world.”
On Friday, government ministers and culture officials met at what is now a raw concrete and steel structure for the so-called topping-out ceremony that marks the end of the major structural work which started two years ago.
MacGregor, who was reportedly hand-picked for the job by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, hopes to “tell the story of humanity” with artefacts from Berlin’s many rich collections, ranging from European antiquity to East Asian arts.
The 590 million euro (US$660 million) domed venue is a reconstruction of a jewel of Baroque architecture on the city’s Unter den Linden boulevard.
The original palace was badly damaged in World War II and its remains blown up by East Germany, which replaced it with its 1970s Palace of the Republic.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany reunited the following year, bitter debate long raged about whether to keep the communist monument or raze it to rebuild Berlin’s original palace. The latter option was approved by parliament in 2007.
The replica, designed by Italian architect Franco Stella, will be fitted on three sides with baroque sandstone facades and a fourth modern front facing the Spree River.
The Humboldt Forum will house artefacts from Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, Asian Art Museum as well as Humboldt University.
MacGregor was named head of the curators panel along with art historian Horst Bredekamp and archaeologist Hermann Parzinger.
“The Berlin collections are astonishingly rich,” he said last month.
“But until now it’s not been possible to think of all the Berlin collections as one, to use them together to address the big questions of human existence, human culture,” he said.
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