Another Saturday, another splendid museum and architectural experience. We spent three or four hours touring the Neues Museum ("New Museum"), which houses the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection and the Museum of Prehistory and Early History, along with artifacts from the Collection of Classical Antiquities. The museum reopened in fall 2009, with rightful fanfare for the work of architect David Chipperfield, who thoughtfully brought back to life a badly bombed structure designed by the architect Friedrich August Stüler in the mid-19th century. (For my St. Louis readers: Chipperfield is the architect behind the major expansion of the Saint Louis Art Museum [disclosure: a client].)

There's a lot written about Chipperfield and this project, but this brand new Guardian profile of Chipperfield gives some useful background: 

Chipperfield likes to compare Germany, the country most congenial to his public-minded seriousness, with Britain. Germany gave him "the experience of a lifetime" in his rebuilding of the Neues Museum in Berlin....

At the Neues Museum Chipperfield took on a grand 19th-century building, much damaged by wartime bombing and then by neglect under the old East German regime, and returned it to its original purpose as the home of ancient treasures including the bust of Nefertiti. His big idea was not to create a perfect simulacrum of the prewar building, nor to juxtapose the wreck with something crystalline and perfect, but to create a fusion of original building, ruin and new work. In places rooms were restored to their prewar state, but more often they were cleaned up, stabilised versions of the spaces as he found them, with fragments of decoration clinging to exposed brick and stone. In places the pockmarks of shrapnel and the scorches of fire were left on view. Where necessary wholly new structures were built, echoing but not copying the old.

Here spaces are made by different layers of time: the making of the original building and its subsequent alterations, the bombing and decay, the restoration, the archaeological time of the exhibits and the faster-moving time of the daily visitors. It took 12 years to make, from Chipperfield's appointment in 1997 to its public opening the autumn before last, years of patient consideration of each fragment and bit of wall, of diplomacy and battles, of dealing with controversy. "The difference between good and bad architecture is the time you spend on it," he says, and here he got to spend plenty.

There was a move to get Unesco to describe the museum and its surroundings as "endangered" because of Chipperfield's approach, and he was publicly accused of fetishising destruction, of harping morbidly on the horrors of the 1940s. He argued that his aim was not "demonstration of damage but demonstration of the beauty that was there". The project eventually opened to almost universal acclaim, and Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had previously been cagey, declared it "one of the most important museum buildings in European cultural history." Berliners queued for three hours to see it on its opening weekend, and it has attracted 1.4 million visitors in the 15 months since its opening.

Chipperfield says that he was nervous about taking on the project: "I thought I'd spend 10 years on restoration." His wife Evelyn asked him if he was sure he wanted to do it. "She thought I'd do a lot of work and just end up with an old building that had been there before." Now, he says, "to have done something that means so much, a national object dealing with national emotions: nothing can compete with that."

I've posted a full gallery of photographs from our trip on Flickr, a handful of which below. The one artwork you won't see is the museum's most famous — the bust of Nefertiti — as photographs of that one aren't allowed. Be rest assured that it's a beauty.