On 3 August 1830 the Altes Museum opened in Berlin, on the Lustgarten facing the royal palace. From outside it is a long temple: eighteen Ionic columns on a podium, a flight of steps as wide as the whole façade. Inside, behind the colonnade, the visitor finds a rotunda covered by a coffered dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, and on either side two great staircases from which, through the columns, one looks out at the square. It is the first Prussian public museum and one of the first in Europe designed from the start as a museum. Its author is Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841).
Schinkel was born in Neuruppin and trained in Berlin with Friedrich Gilly, who died young and whose drawings for a monument to Frederick the Great marked him. After a journey to Italy in 1803–05 he worked as a painter of panoramas and stage designer, and designed the sets for The Magic Flute (1816), with the celebrated starry sky of the Queen of the Night. When Prussia, after Napoleon's defeat, needed to give its state a face, he was put in charge of public building. In twenty years he designed the Neue Wache (1816–18), the Theatre (Schauspielhaus, 1818–21), the Altes Museum, churches, bridges, palaces.
The museum as an institution
Before Schinkel, royal collections were visited in palaces. The Altes Museum invents a type: a public building dedicated to art, with a clear route (entrance, rotunda, galleries, staircases), conceived for the education of citizens more than for the pleasure of the prince. The central rotunda, with ancient statues arranged beneath the dome, works as a solemn vestibule, a space that prepares the visit. The model is so effective that in the course of the nineteenth century it would be taken up by museums throughout Europe and America.
The Bauakademie: brick as structure
His most radical work is less well known. Between 1832 and 1836 Schinkel built in Berlin the Bauakademie, the Prussian school of architecture: a cube of red brick with four equal sides, windows laid out in a regular grid and simple terracotta friezes. There is no portico, no column. The façade shows the structure: the piers, the bays, the windows. Schinkel declares he wants to make a building in which every element has a constructional meaning. Twentieth-century modernists would read it as a precursor, and not wrongly: the logic of a modular, repetitive building, honest about its materials, is already all there.
The Bauakademie suffered war damage and was demolished in 1962 by the East German government to make way for a ministerial building. Since then its reconstruction has been a recurring theme in the Berlin debate: a model of the façade was erected in the 1990s, and in recent years the federal government has funded a reconstruction project. The problem is not technical but theoretical, and is the same as that of the Neues Museum: do you rebuild what was destroyed, or accept the loss?