Detail page - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz

From 2027, the Altar Hall and the Hall of Hellenistic Architecture as well as the north wing of the Pergamonmuseum with the new permanent exhibition of the Museum of Islamic Art will be open to the public again. In the meantime, the south wing will be repaired, a new fourth wing will be built and the pedestrian bridge over the Kupfergraben and the outdoor facilities will be refurbished until the building is fully reopened in 2037.

From 2027, access to the partially opened Pergamonmuseum will be via the northern, Spree-side section of the colonnades on Museum Island, as the Court of Honour will still be needed as a construction site until the entire construction work is completed. The interim entrance to the building will therefore be on its eastern side. The cash desk and cloakroom areas as well as the toilets and shop will be set up in the central building in the rooms below the altar hall. These rooms are currently still being refurbished.

In the Altar Hall and the Hall of Hellenistic Architecture , numerous objects from the Collection of Classical Antiquities have already been restored and are in place. The Pergamon Altar is free of scaffolding and the steps of the large flight of steps are currently being restored. The area in front of the altar is currently being used as temporary storage for the façade elements of the Mschatta façade. These 527 façade elements have been successively brought into the north wing since the end of 2024 and are now being installed there in front of the prefabricated substructure. This work will be completed in autumn 2025 with the final grouting. At the same time, two large exhibition architectures will be erected in the space in front of the Mshatta façade from April 2025, in line with the Museum of Islamic Art's new exhibition concept. In an innovative way, accompanied by contemporary interventions and communicative graphics, the cultural-historical connections to antiquity and China will be thematised here in focus rooms on early Islamic history.

The installation of the altar hall can then be continued from the end of 2025: Five female robed statues from the altar terrace, the roof attachment figures from the Pergamon altar and the panels from the Telephos frieze will be installed there in the following months. They will remain in the Pergamonmuseum until 31 August. The Panorama, which will close briefly on 1 September for the relocation measures. Installation work is also currently taking place in the Altar Hall: The Hephaestion mosaic is currently being laid in the Telephos Hall. This mosaic from the Royal Palaces of Pergamon is thus returning to the place where it was exhibited in 1930. From 1959 to 2012, it was on display in the Hall of Hellenistic Architecture. Thanks to the remodelling, it can now be experienced again in its original appearance of a large square. The last objects will take their place there in the coming weeks. A highlight of the room is the statue of Athena Parthenos from the Library of Pergamon.

The rooms of the Collection of Classical Antiquities have essentially been returned to their historical state and carefully restored. The Pergamon Museum is not only unique in its presentation of ancient architecture on a 1:1 scale, but is also one of the world's most important daylight museums. The illuminated ceiling and glass roof were completely renewed and new roof structures were added. Room scaffolding was therefore erected in the 18 metre high architecture halls, which not only created a working platform but also protected the objects remaining in the building. After completion of the daylight ceiling, they were dismantled and the natural stone floor was then restored. Unlike in the past, however, the rooms neighbouring the Altar Hall and the Hellenistic Hall will in future also be set up as exhibition rooms and supplemented with contemporary presentations. The Museum of Islamic Art, on the other hand, has planned a completely new permanent exhibition in its new rooms. In future, it will be represented on two floors in the north wing, i.e. over twice as much space. The number of objects on display will be correspondingly higher than before, with many works exhibited for the first time and spectacular loans.

HermannParzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, explains: "The time until 2027 is not long now and the anticipation is growing to finally see a considerable part of the Pergamonmuseum in a completely new guise: the north wing with the Museum of Islamic Art on double the space, more spacious than ever, plus the Pergamon Altar in its new old splendour. There is still some work to be done, but we can already see what awaits us in two years' time - a magnificent new presentation."

Stefan Weber, Director of the Museum of Islamic Art: "Objects, themes and stories will be made accessible in a new way in the 24 exhibition rooms. True to the motto 'not everything for everyone, but something for everyone', there is a wide range of digital, haptic and sensitive approaches that offer visitors an interactive and personalised experience. In the introductory room behind the Hellenistic Hall, we are already trying to bridge the gap between late antiquity and the present: over a hundred years ago, Berlin research and museology were internationally pioneering with the concept of 'Islam in the frame of reference of antiquity'. For us today, this is worth its weight in gold in cultural education work: cultures don't fall from the sky, they are connected."

Andreas Scholl, Director of the Collection of Classical Antiquities, explains: "An incredible amount has happened in the architecture halls of the Collection of Classical Antiquities - but much of it is not visible at first glance. The guiding principle behind all the measures in these rooms was to preserve the listed ensemble and maintain the staging of the historical exhibition. We have therefore only made changes with the utmost caution, unless they hark back to the original state when the museum opened in 1930."

Highlights

One of the highlights of the Museum of Islamic Art in the Pergamonmuseum is the Mshatta façade. It came to Berlin in 1903 as a gift from the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Originally, the over 5 metre high façade formed the magnificent prelude to the so-called Mshatta Palace in what is now Jordan. Its limestone reliefs depict mythical creatures and animals in paradisiacal gardens. "The façade is one of the most important objects of early Islamic art because it combines elements from Roman-Byzantine Late Antiquity and Persian culture," explains MartinaMüller-Wiener, Deputy Director of the Museum of Islamic Art.

The building contains 425 original stones and 102 artificial stones. These 527 blocks with a total weight of 126 tonnes were removed stone by stone after the closure of the Mshatta Hall on the upper floor of the south wing in 2022. The dismantling was carried out according to a specially developed scheme so that stones that belong together can later be restored in parallel and reassembled correctly at the end. During cleaning and restoration, mortar residue, cement slurry, adhesive materials and surface deposits were removed. In the new exhibition hall, the first row of original stones was placed on a prefabricated plinth in front of the concrete substructure. The following rows are successively placed on top. Each stone is secured by stainless steel tilting anchors anchored in the concrete wall. Once the façade is back in place, the joints are closed, additions are made and any necessary retouching is carried out.

The aim when installing the façade was always to make the situation at the original location tangible: a strictly symmetrical structure with a wide, centrally positioned portal and flanking towers. For reasons of space, this was not possible either in the Bode Museum or in its previous location in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum. The guiding principle for the future reinstallation is the state in which it was found in 1903. The symmetrical appearance will be restored and the missing right-hand section will be supplemented with artificial stone so that the façade can once again be experienced across its full original width of 45 metres. The artificial stone reconstruction, which is now being created parallel to the original façade, is the result of several years of dialogue between museum experts, conservationists, building researchers, restorers and stonemasons. The challenge is to achieve a balanced overall visual impression in which the reconstruction harmonises with the original without developing an overly dominant aesthetic life of its own.

The Great Frieze in the Altar Hall of the Pergamon Museum, with its world-famous depiction of the battle of the gods against the giants, remained in the museum throughout the construction period. Its panels had already been restored between 1996 and 2004. Further assembly and disassembly of the relief panels, which weigh up to 2.5 tonnes and are 2.30 metres high, was therefore to be avoided. With this in mind, an elaborate package of protective and control measures was put together for the construction period: In addition to protective panelling, highly sensitive measuring technology was also installed. The smallest movements of walls and floors around the building were digitally recorded and transmitted in real time to the site managers, restoration planners and those responsible for the antiquities collection. When certain threshold values were reached, the construction work was stopped to prevent damage. At the same time, the reconstructed west front of the Pergamon Altar, as well as all other architectural reconstructions in the Collection of Classical Antiquities, were restored to their former splendour. This included, for example, removing various layers of oil and emulsion paints that had been applied over the past decades and made the contours of the profiles of the building elements appear blurred, and exposing the original construction period setting.

The telephos frieze, on the other hand, would have been exposed to too great a risk in the hall above the altar's large flight of steps due to the work being carried out in the immediate vicinity on the roof construction, which weighs several tonnes. Its 1.60 metre high and therefore significantly smaller and less heavy relief panels have been on display in the Pergamon Museum since 2018, together with other outstanding finds from Pergamon. The panorama opposite the Bode Museum. The Telephos frieze adorned the walls of the inner courtyard of the Pergamon Altar. It depicts the life of the mythical hero Telephos, who was regarded as the founder of Pergamon and the ancestor of its ruling family. Of the original 74 marble relief panels, 47 have been preserved in whole or in part. They are all on display; individual heads that have not been adapted will be on show in a display case in the corridor below the altar.

The Hephaistion mosaic will be laid in the centre of the Telephos Hall until May. It comes from one of the royal palaces on the Acropolis of Pergamon, which was located in the immediate neighbourhood of the sanctuary of the city goddess Athena. Floors made of multi-coloured natural stone with geometric and vegetal patterns as well as figurative scenes were created in Greece from the 4th century BC and flourished in the following Hellenistic centuries, especially around the royal residences. The example from Pergamon is one of the few signed mosaics. Its illusionistic design makes it stand out even more: "Hephaistion has made (it)" is written in black on a white background, which looks like a piece of paper pinned to the floor with drawing pins, one corner of which has come loose. The mosaic is once again presented in the Telephos Hall, as it was between 1930 and 1939, albeit without the largely modern reconstructed outer fields of the floor for reasons of space. In ancient times, the actual altar of burnt offerings was located in the place where the mosaic lies, of which only very few architectural elements have survived.

In the centre of the Hall of Hellenistic Architecture, already visible from the neighbouring altar hall, the majestic, clearly larger-than-life marble statue of Athena Parthenos from Pergamon draws the eye. It is a Hellenistic sculpture from the 2nd century BC based on a much older, prominent model: the cult statue of the city goddess of Athens, the "virgin" (Parthenos) Athena by Phidias in the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis. The Phidiasian original from the 5th century BC was significantly larger and executed in expensive materials (gold and ivory). By repeating this work on a smaller scale and in marble, the kings of Pergamon emphasised their commitment to the Athenian model in political, artistic and cultic terms. The statue of the goddess, whose remit also included the arts and sciences, was placed in the Pergamon library, which was considered one of the largest and most important in antiquity. During the construction of the Pergamon Museum, it was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for several years.

The Pergamon Museum is being completely renovated and extended as part of the Museum Island Masterplan. The building, which was constructed between 1910 and 1930 according to plans by Alfred Messel, was badly damaged during the Second World War and has never been thoroughly renovated since. The general refurbishment and additions are being carried out according to plans by architect O.M. Ungers and under the direction of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning. The overall project is divided into two construction phases, which are being realised as two separate projects. Construction phase A comprises the north wing and the northern centre section of the building. Costs totalling around 489 million euros have been budgeted for this. Construction work began in January 2013 in the vacated north wing. The Altar Hall was closed to visitors in the autumn of the following year.

Save the date:Press event on construction phase B (south wing) of the Pergamonmuseum on 6 March 2025, invitation to follow.