A Place Solely for the Contemplation of Art

Exhibition and Documentation of Major Architectural Competition for the Museum Island, 1883-84 / Opening on September 16 / Press Tour 10 a.m. In 1883 the Prussian Ministry of Culture advertised an architectural competition to design the Museum Island in Berlin. Now for the first time all the submitted blueprints are being documented in an exhibition and a book. The works by German and Austrian architects belong to a cultural and art historical period during the time when the German Empire was rising to become a Great Power. The exhibition will include digitized original blueprints, historical light prints, sketches, journals, photographs, and paintings. The competition was intended to create a unique space for the contemplation of ancient and modern art in the area between the New Museum, the metropolitan railway line, and the tip of the Spree Island. The center of the area was intended to be for the Pergamon Altar along with the archaeological finds from Pergamon and Olympia. But the, at that time, world's largest collection of casts as well as the rapidly expanding collection of paintings and sculptures of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that were being collected by Wilhelm von Bode, also needed new exhibition rooms.