Archaeology competence centre opposite Museum Island Berlin celebrates topping-out ceremony
Press release from 09/22/2010
Today's topping-out ceremony for the new Archaeology Competence Centre in the presence of Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel, Ministerial Director at the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and Jan Mücke, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Building Ministry, marks a further step towards realising the Museum Island Master Plan. The buildings on the Museumshöfe, the area between Kupfergraben, Geschwister-Scholl-Straße and the Stadtbahn viaduct, will in future house workrooms and depots as well as a new central library for the archaeological collections of the National Museums in Berlin.
"With the Competence Centre for Archaeology, we are gaining a new address for archaeological research in the increasingly dense educational landscape in the centre of Berlin," said Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. "The new central library for archaeology will offer the specialist public a significantly improved service, and the museums will benefit from synergy effects thanks to the spatial concentration of their offices and workshops."
The Archaeology Competence Centre will be used by the Museum of the Ancient Near East, the Museum of Islamic Art, the Museum of Prehistory and Early History, the Collection of Classical Antiquities and the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection. In addition to the new building, it also includes the already renovated and occupied old buildings on Geschwister Scholl-Strasse, to which a connection will be established in the basement.
The new building, planned by the Stuttgart architects harris + kurrle, will comprise 6,800 square metres of main floor space for work rooms for collection directors and scientists. Workshops (restoration workshops, a central photography and stone workshop and a carpet workshop), laboratories and depots will also be built there. The new central archaeological library will offer a significant advantage for the specialist public: It will bring together all the specialised libraries on archaeology that were previously attached to the individual collections and scattered across different locations. In addition, it will house parts of the central archive, which will also manage and maintain it together with the art library. It will be open to the public from the end of 2012. From 2012, the depot areas of the Competence Centre will also be available for those museum collections that have to move out of the Pergamonmuseum before the first construction phase of the basic renovation and extension of the building begins in 2013. Overall, the competence centre will relieve the historic museum buildings on the Museum Island of technical and operational infrastructure, allowing even more space to be used for the presentation of the collections.
In February 2007, harris + kurrle architekten bda (Stuttgart) won first prize in the limited open competition for the realisation of the new building for the Competence Centre for Archaeology. The design consists of two interlocking structures: Next to the old building on Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse is a five-storey section that will house the library, among other things. The main entrance to the building will also be located in this so-called head building, in the immediate vicinity of the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Centre of the Humboldt University. A further three-storey structure will continue the new building in the direction of Monbijou Bridge. Sand-coloured clinker brick will be used as the uniform façade material. The use of geothermal energy is planned to supply the building with heating and cooling. The approved construction costs (excluding initial fit-out) amount to 40 million euros.
The topping-out ceremony marks a further step towards the realisation of the Museum Island Master Plan adopted in 1999, which, in addition to the renovation of the historic buildings on the Museum Island, their connection at the basic level, the construction of a central entrance building and the restoration and upgrading of the open spaces, also envisages the creation of new buildings for administration, storage and workshop areas on the former site of the Friedrich Engels barracks. For the future, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is also aiming to utilise the rest of the Museumshöfe site: As an extension to the Bode Museum, a gallery building is to be built on the other side of the Kupfergraben, which will make it possible to integrate the Old Masters and thus present the entire culture and art of Europe and the Middle East up to the 19th century on the Museum Island.