Until the Neues Museum reopened last fall in Berlin, few visitors knew about this quietly palatial edifice built between 1843 and 1859. Located to the north of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s magnificent Neoclassical Altes Museum (1824–30) on Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this conventionally dignified four-story museum was designed by Friedrich August Stüler, one of Schinkel’s leading pupils, to didactically display archaeological finds of the prehistoric, ancient Egyptian, and Classical eras. Stüler had a good client: Frederick William IV, who took over the Prussian kingdom in 1840, also studied architecture with Schinkel, as Joseph Rykwert recounts in Neues Museum Berlin: David Chipperfield Architects in Collaboration with Julian Harrap (2009). It was the king’s idea to devote a part of an island surrounded by the Spree River in central Berlin to a monumental architectural ensemble that attested to Germany’s intellectual and artistic stature.

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