This book, edited by David Chipperfield, documents his most important project to date: the Neues Museum, the centrepiece of the Berlin Museumsinsel. Here he connects the old and new in a completely novel way. As he says himself, he proceeded like a painter, who painstakingly considers every dab of paint. Photographs by Candida Höfer show the rooms after their completion and before they were furnished. As Höfer avoided using artificial light, the rooms are bathed in a soft natural light. These critical moments are perfectly reproduced in the book as matt colour plates. The photographer is inspired by the empty rooms and grandiose corridors of space to then dedicate her attention to the architects interventions. This artistic-photographic documentation is complemented by texts from wellknown architects, architectural historians, art historians and conservation architects. They highlight the fundamental principles of the project of conservation and complementation. Kenneth Frampton discusses the almost historical endeavour to restore such a building and responds to Chipperfields architectural interventions, purely abstract forms that avoid any trace of kitsch. Joseph Rykwert describes the fragmented history of which this building is evidence, thanks to its many layers. An interview with David Chipperfield byWolfgangWolters imparts insights into the problems and questions that the restoration posed, and in his contribution, ThomasWeski takes a closer look at Candida Höfers photography. In addition, a chronology offers an overview of the history of the building, the request for proposals for its reconstruction and the restoration itself.

This lavish publication presents the Neues Museum, badly damaged during the Second World War and recently restored and reopened, in all its glory. Numerous full-page photographs magnificently showcase both the museum's architecture and its collection One of the great museums of the 19th century, the Neues Museum in Berlin, built between 1843 to 1855 to a design by Friedrich August Stuler, was celebrated both for its important collections and its innovative integration of exhibition concept and magnificent interior designs. Badly damaged during the Second World War, the building has been sympathetically restored by the British architect David Chipperfield and his team, whose work skilfully combines a rigorous respect for the original architecture on the one hand, with a commitment to modern design and contemporary exhibition needs on the other. This lavish publication presents the reopened Neues Museum in all its glory. Numerous full-page photographs magnificently showcase both the museum's architecture and its collection. The famous Mythological Room, Roman Room and the Room of the Niobids, as well as the extensive wall paintings of Wilhelm von Kaulbach and the historic floors, are described in detailed individual chapters. Other chapters re-examine the museum's eventful history and detail the extensive programme of restoration. Historical and current illustrations and floorplans complete this comprehensive and beautifully illustrated work on one of the finest museums in the world.

The Contemporary Museum issues a challenge to those who view the museum as an artefact of history, constrained in its outlook as much by professional, institutional and disciplinary creed, as by the collections it accumulated in the distant past. Denying that the museum can locate its purpose in the pursuit of tradition or in idealistic speculation about the future, the book asserts that this can only be found through an ongoing and proactive negotiation with the present: the contemporary. This volume is not concerned with any present, but with the peculiar circumstances of what it refers to as the ‘global contemporary’ – the sense of living in a globally connected world that is preoccupied with the contemporary. To situate the museum in this world of real and immediate need and action, beyond the reach of history, the book argues, is to empower it to challenge existing dogmas and inequalities and sweep aside old hierarchies. As a result, fundamental questions need to be asked about such things as the museum’s relationship to global time and space, to systems and technologies of knowing, to ‘the life well lived’, to the movement and rights of people, and to the psychology, permanence and organisation of culture. Incorporating diverse viewpoints from around the world, The Contemporary Museum is a follow-up volume to Museum Revolutions and, as such, should be essential reading for students in the fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural studies, communication and media studies, art history and social policy. Academics and museum professionals will also find this book a source of inspiration.

Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed an unprecedented level of large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure, in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. This period has also seen the creation of countless new purpose-built museums and galleries, suggesting a fundamental re-evaluation of the processes of designing and shaping of museums. Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions examines this re-making by exploring the inherently spatial character of narrative in the museum and its potential to connect on the deepest levels with human perception and imagination. Through this uniting theme, the chapters explore the power of narratives as structured experiences unfolding in space and time as well as the use of theatre, film and other technologies of storytelling by contemporary museum makers to generate meaningful and, it is argued here, highly effective and affective museum spaces. Contributions by an internationally diverse group of museum and heritage professionals, exhibition designers, architects and artists with academics from a range of disciplines including museum studies, theatre studies, architecture, design and history cut across traditional boundaries including the historical and the contemporary and together explore the various roles and functions of narrative as a mechanism for the creation of engaging and meaningful interpretive environments.

"Antiquity on Display" offers an insight into the history of the imaginative reproductions of architecture housed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum and the shifting regimes of the authentic in museum displays from the 19th century to the present.

To survey art history as a whole was a pressing task for a generation of German scholars around the mid-nineteenth century. Their projections of a historicist chain of artworks ranged from textual narratives without illustrations, to separate picture compendia as well as images of a more allegorical kind. Other means with which to picture art history as part of a virtually all-encompassing cultural history were the museums of art erected in Germany at the time, in Berlin and Munich especially. This book deals with practices of representing art history in various media. This includes post-Hegelian texts and engravings of art history from the 1840s onwards, by Franz Kugler, Julius Schnorr and others. In addition, works of art of the late twentieth century, by Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer and others, provide opportunities to speculate on the after-effects and discursive traces of the old regime. Extending the concept of historiography to include not just textual or institutional endeavours, but a host of different images as well, from reproductive prints to pop paintings and visual archives of the digital era, this study is intended to contribute in new ways to a critical historiography of the field of art history and visual culture today.