Architecture and History in Germany

Bode-Museum

The Bode-Museum in Berlin stands at the northern end of the Museumsinsel, an island in the River Spree that is home to a complex of great museums. Some people like to talk of the Bode-Museum as a “moated castle” on account of its magnificent neobaroque architecture and waterside location.

But it has also been called a “treasure house of sculpture” because it accommodates the world’s largest and most significant sculpture collection, which represents the evolution of this art form in Western culture from late antiquity to Prussian classicism.

Due to his powerful position and military manner, Wilhelm von Bode, the museum’s founder, was widely known as the “Museum General”. When he took possession of the building constructed by court architect Ernst Eberhard von Ihne between 1897 and 1904, it was wholly naturally lit and had no artificial lighting installed. Originally, the museum was named after the German Emperor Frederick, a fact that, under the GDR, was almost the undoing of the building, which had been badly damaged during the Second World War. The politically motivated renaming of the museum after its founder in 1957 opened the way for repair work to begin.

Redevelopment of the Museumsinsel

Projection 2015

Following reunification, the Bode-Museum – like the other buildings on the island – did not comply with contemporary technical specifications for museums or meet modern building standards and was included in the redevelopment programme for the Museumsinsel, which has since been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This programme will probably take until 2020 to complete, and current estimates suggest that its total costs are set to reach 1.5 billion euros. As part of the project, the planners want to correct major shortcomings in the organisation of the area’s urban environment. The museums are not accessible from a single public space, and some can only be reached over bridges that lead to them from outside the island. There is no dedicated route joining up all the various buildings on the Museumsinsel, which also has the viaduct that carries the main east-west railway line through the centre of Berlin cutting across it. The intention is to erect a shared entrance building next to the Neues Museum, while an “Archaeological Promenade” is to connect the museums together.

One task for the Viennese architect Heinz Tesar, who had won the competition to rebuild the Bode-Museum, was therefore to design the underground link to this future passage. Apart from that, he had to restore the building in a way that did justice to its historic significance, a challenge he has lived up to in an impressive fashion, as the assembled dignitaries at the inaugural ceremony unanimously acknowledged. They and the public had been encouraged to see the restoration in a positive light by the skilful public relations strategy of Peter-Klaus Schuster, the Director General of the National Museums in Berlin, and the euphoric coverage given to the great event in the press.

High-tech machine in a historic setting

Basilica

It is true that the conservation specialists are maintaining a stubborn silence and the complaints of worried architectural historians that were to be heard when the finished, but still empty, museum was presented in November 2005 faded away some time ago. But in all the jubilation at the magnificent new sculpture exhibition, it is being overlooked that, as a historic structure, the Bode-Museum has suffered some pretty rough treatment, at least internally. The original floors and the impressive wooden ceilings, both the historic examples from Italy and those built at the time of the building’s construction, have been carefully restored of course. But the priority given to museum technology, air conditioning, lighting and fire protection, on the one hand, and the recreation of the historicist architecture’s idealised visual value, on the other, have resulted in the destruction of a considerable amount of the building’s original fabric where it stood in the way of these goals. Today, the Bode-Museum is a high-tech machine in a historic setting. Its walls have been perforated by ventilation ducts and service systems, and some have been completely removed and rebuilt, while almost all the wall surfaces are new. The stucco ceilings in the upper storeys are also new, and the skylights no longer perform their intended function because a new storey to accommodate technical facilities has been added above them. In short, the reconstruction work, which cost 152 million euros, was not guided by the principle of sensitive restoration that preserves as much as possible of a building’s original fabric.

There is little enthusiasm for the stainless steel aesthetics of the glass wall in the new Romanic room, and the impact of the fashionable lights in the reconstructed central “basilica” is genuinely intrusive. However, the museum staff have already become accustomed to the massive pedestals for the sculptures, and Tesar has succeeded with the underpinning of the eastern rotunda stairwell, the crypt-like atmosphere of which will draw visitors into the entrance to the Archaeological Promenade when it is finally opened.

The price paid for the glorious resurrection of the Bode-Museum as a Wilhelmine temple of culture recreated in an ideal condition has been the loss of the accretions of time laid down over a whole century – which would have been of such interest to architectural historians. The value of the building as a historic monument has been sacrificed to its visual value. A museum “restored in line with conservation principles” (Peter-Klaus Schuster) would certainly have looked rather different.