ABSTRACT
Berlin’s Museumsinsel, or Museum Island, between the River Spree and Spree canal has been a junction of the city’s two sides for several centuries. To the east is Berlin’s “middle” and the site of the city’s medieval origins and to the west is the eighteenth century Friederichstadt. This division remained influential throughout the past several centuries and, following World War II and despite reunification in the 1990s, remains true today. As the link between the city’s two halves, it contains several public buildings symbolic for the German people, its culture and its aspirations. The buildings are predominantly grandiose Baroque and neo-Renaissance structures constructed between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and include Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann’s Pergamon Museum. At the island’s center is the Lustgarten bordered by the Altes Museum to the northwest, the Berliner Dom (main cathedral) to the northeast and, until the 1950s, Berlin’s Schloss. Unfortunately this ensemble of buildings, distributed more or less as objects on spaces on the island, create more residual rather than well-defined spaces.
