Haus Bastian will expand Berlin's Museum Island in future: the donation agreement has been signed
Press release from 09/28/2017
The Bastian family will hand over the gallery building designed by David Chipperfield at Kupfergraben 10 to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation next year. It will be used in future as a centre for cultural education and will bear the name "Haus Bastian der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz". To emphasise their determination, the Bastian family has already had their donation notarised. Foundation President Hermann Parzinger and the Chair of the Foundation Council, Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters, thank the Bastian family for their generous gift.
Monika Grütters acknowledges this step: "With this extremely generous gesture, the Bastian family is not only giving the cultural nation of Germany a building of considerable value - a genuine Chipperfield building in the heart of Berlin - but above all the opportunity to introduce an even larger audience to the cultural treasures from Europe and the Middle East that can be admired on Museum Island in a centre for cultural education. Cultural education work follows the constant ambition to reach as many people in our country as possible in their everyday lives in order to inspire them with enthusiasm for art and culture. The Foundation will be trialling new forms of participation, communication and inclusion here - a forward-looking task to which museums and cultural policy must dedicate themselves even more than before. How much we need such places of self-assurance and cosmopolitanism has become more than clear, not least with the entry of a right-wing populist party as the third strongest force in the German Bundestag."
Hermann Parzinger commented: "I am delighted that everything has led to such a good result, and I would like to thank the Bastian family for their particular generosity and outstanding commitment. In future, the museum will be aimed at a diverse, but especially young audience, because children and young people are our visitors of tomorrow. We will develop new formats of cultural education here, and I am sure that the generous architecture and the wonderful rooms designed by David Chipperfield will inspire this work. The fact that we are dedicating such a beautiful and prominent building in this favoured location to such a use clearly demonstrates the importance we attach to cultural education. This has a signalling effect far beyond the Museum Island."
Heiner Bastian says: "If we imagine the topography of Berlin's centre, we are literally at home in the intellectual centre of Berlin, the Museum Island. The island is the vision of real, existing, artistic forms, material, tangible and sensual: a grandiose place that forms its own aphorism of the world's artistic cultures in a canon of encyclopaedic vastness."
Aeneas Bastian explains: "I can't imagine anything else in the Am Kupfergraben rooms than a cultural life. The new education centre of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation will soon move into the building. I hope that the past and the future will come together here, beyond a traditional school of seeing."
The building is located directly opposite the James Simon Gallery, also designed by Chipperfield, which is currently being constructed as the new entrance building to the Museum Island. With its spacious and clear architecture, it is on a par with the Museum Island World Heritage Site and also extends it functionally. In future, new forward-looking educational concepts will be developed and trialled on the four floors of the building. They will be aimed at different user groups and address current social issues.
In this way, it will not only be possible to prepare for and follow up on museum visits. Themes will be addressed here that allow bridges to be built between the collections and museums. This will also include the Humboldt Forum, which will one day form a single unit with the Museum Island. The spectrum of planned activities ranges from workshops, study and project days, open workshops to lectures and discussions and much more. There will be spacious work areas and rooms for researching and studying, communicating and discussing, presenting and reflecting on new experiences. The Education / Communication Department of the National Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage is responsible for the concept for the Centre for Cultural Education.
The building, designed by David Chipperfield with a gross floor area of almost 2000 square metres, was built by the Bastian family and has been used as a gallery building since 2007.