Detail page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

The new building, surrounded on the street side by the mighty wings of the historic complex, is one of the largest and at the same time most inconspicuous building sites in the historic centre of Berlin. When the reading room is inaugurated in 2008, the State Library will regain its centrepiece, which was lost during the bombing raids of the Second World War. In addition to the central reading room with 250 workstations, the new building will also have a vault in the two basement levels, which will house the unrivalled historical treasures of the largest academic universal library in the German-speaking world: Manuscripts, bequests, maps, music autographs - including 80 per cent of all surviving Bach manuscripts, the world's largest Mozart collection, several Beethoven symphonies and autographs by Lessing, Goethe and Kleist, as well as much more. The new building will also contain an open stacks, an information centre, a special reading room and a generally accessible area with a library museum, a room for temporary exhibitions, event rooms, a cafeteria and a bookshop. In future, 300,000 volumes will be directly accessible in the central reading room and the open access area of the new building. From the inside, the reading room will present itself as a "wooden book shell" crowned by a glass cube.

At the same time as the construction of the new building, the historic facility will undergo extensive refurbishment and modernisation, which will be completed by 2011. The federal government is providing a total of 326 million euros for this purpose. The planning for the entire construction project is the responsibility of HG Merz, whose design was awarded first prize in an architectural competition in 2000.

The measures go back to a decision by the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in December 1998, in which an overall concept with two locations was defined for the State Library institution, which had been reunited six years previously. This meant that the Haus Unter den Linden, together with the Museum Island and the Humboldt University, which is so important for the educational landscape in the centre of historic Berlin, could retain its function, as could the Scharoun Building located at the Kulturforum and Potsdamer Platz.

In future, 670,000 of the already more than 10 million volumes will be directly accessible in the reading rooms and open access areas of both locations.