2016 - News - Detail Page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The museum complex in Berlin-Dahlem is to be expanded into a research campus in the coming years. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the National Museums in Berlin have therefore initiated a potential analysis, which was prepared by Arnold und Gladisch Architekten on behalf of Partnerschaft Deutschland.

These are the key messages of the paper:

• In future, a new so-called "campus axis" should function like a backbone and a connecting link between the Dahlem parts of the building, between the foyers in Arnimallee and Lansstraße. This axis leads to the heart of the complex, where the public zones are located - a Dahlem shop window, central library areas, central exhibition areas and a marketplace from which the public and semi-public areas can be accessed. This concept includes temporary exhibitions and a glass laboratory.
  
• The Institute for Museum Research and the Rathgen Research Laboratory of the National Museums in Berlin are also to be located at the Dahlem site in future. In addition, the book collections of the Ethnological Museum, the Museum of Asian Art and the Museum of European Cultures are to be brought together in a specialised library of art and cultures of the world, currently comprising 230,000 volumes, under the management of the Art Library. This will create a lively library centre with a contemporary character.
  
• Bundling the research resources in the Dahlem museum complex would have the great advantage that further sensible and cost-saving structural measures could be implemented at the same time. For example, the offices of the director and all employees, the library, restoration workshops and depots of the Museum of European Cultures are currently not housed in the actual Dahlem museum complex, but in the former storage building of the Prussian Secret State Archives. The latter in turn has to move a large part of its sensitive archival material to rented storage rooms in the West Harbour and transport it back and forth between the two locations at great expense. Seizing the opportunity to reorganise the Dahlem site, all the museums would benefit from a space swap. The Museum of European Cultures would move its administration, library, workshops and collection to the space vacated by the exhibition areas of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, which would be relocated to the Humboldt Forum. The Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage would then be able to use the storage wing for its own archives, which are currently housed in the West Harbour.
  
• The Museum of European Cultures (MEK) will remain at the Dahlem museum site as the only building with an active exhibition and event programme. It works in a participatory and network-orientated manner, closely interlinking research and exhibitions on cultural-historical and socio-political topics in Europe. It thus addresses a broad public. The aim of the MEK is to work with its partners and interested citizens to establish a European forum at the Dahlem site. With the museum at its heart, it is intended to be a stage and laboratory for critical European research and civic engagement and serve as a basis for forward-looking social dialogue. The aim is to question old conventions and open up new perspectives on Europe in its global context. By focussing on Europe in a global world, the MEK consequently abolishes the separation of European and non-European ethnology. This naturally requires closer cooperation with the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art as well as an expansion of the existing cooperation with the social and cultural anthropological institutes at the Free University and the Humboldt University.

Further link

Press images