Building for research and cultural heritage - Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden celebrates topping-out ceremony
Press release from 02/05/2008
Today's topping-out ceremony in the presence of Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Building, André Schmitz, State Secretary for Culture of the State of Berlin, and Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, marks the pleasing progress of one of the largest cultural building projects currently underway in the historic centre of Berlin. According to the plans of architect HG Merz, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin will be thoroughly renovated and modernised at its original location on Unter den Linden and supplemented with new components. By mid-2009, it will have a new central reading room with an adjoining open stacks, a rare books reading room for rare and valuable prints as well as exhibition space and vault storage for its most precious treasures.
A torso, the building complex by architect Ernst von Ihne, which was inaugurated in 1914 and severely damaged in the war almost 30 years later, is now once again a whole. Similar to his Bode Museum 10 years earlier, Ihne had created an educational palace with Wilhelminian splendour for the enlightened, aspiring bourgeoisie. Since the destruction during the war, the ingeniously designed central axis ended abruptly in the vestibule. From here, the paths within this huge building complex were no longer straight and efficient, as the architectural and functional centre of the library, the octagonal domed reading room, was severely damaged by bombs in 1943. With the new building, the library finally has its centrepiece back. The original room structure is visible again, the architectural layout is understandable and functionally sensible.
The new building is a contemporary update and interpretation of the historical architecture: the architect HG Merz, who won first prize in the competition in 2000, has designed a light-filled glass cube as the central reading room. The interior extends over a height of 18 metres. There are 250 comfortable workstations, some as lockable room compartments, and surrounding book galleries spread over three floors with adjoining open access areas. A total of almost 300,000 volumes will be freely accessible here.
The library's precious treasures will be stored in two underground vault storeys with 3,000 square metres of floor space: Manuscripts, bequests, maps, music autographs - including 80 per cent of all surviving Bach manuscripts, the world's largest Mozart collection, several Beethoven symphonies, autographs by Lessing, Goethe and Kleist, letters by Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein and much more. They belong to the patrimony of the Germans and to the world cultural heritage.
Surrounded by the four mighty wings of the historic complex - with a width of 107 metres, a length of 170 metres and 13 storeys, comparable to the building volume of the Reichstag - what is being built here is barely visible to the public. The new reading room's tall, brightly lit structure will soon set a clear accent in Berlin's rooftop landscape.
Parallel to the construction of the new parts, the historic building will be thoroughly renovated and technically modernised by 2011, the 350th anniversary of the library's founding.
Once all the construction work - new building and general refurbishment - has been completed, there will be a total of over 52,500 square metres of main usable space available (30,400 square metres of which will be air-conditioned stacks, of which 16,000 square metres will be open to the public), over 656 Internet-enabled, comfortable user workstations and a book transport system 1.5 km long. Around 460,000 volumes will be available here without ordering, i.e. freely accessible.
The costs for the refurbishment and new building total 333 million euros (originally 326 million euros, the increase is due to the 3 per cent increase in VAT since 2007). As with all building investments by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, these costs will be borne solely by the federal government.
Due to the division of Germany and the former Prussian collections, the State Library, which was reunited in 1992, now consists of two large buildings: the Historical Research Library Unter den Linden - in the neighbourhood of Museum Island and Humboldt University as part of the educational landscape in the historic centre of the city - and the Research Library of Modern Art in Scharoun's building on Potsdamer Strasse opposite Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery and the Kulturforum. The distribution of the holdings between the two buildings is based on a dividing line in terms of content, the threshold to modernism around 1900. With 10.5 million books, its unique special collections, its diverse source material, electronic publications and databases, the Staatsbibliothek is the largest academic universal library in the German-speaking world. Its annual acquisition budget is over 10 million euros. Its services are primarily aimed at a readership from science and research. The library's entire holdings are recorded in the electronic library catalogue.