The Altes Museum

Judged on purpose, structure and site. The long front is compelled by the site: a building facing a palace across a square could not answer with a temple front without claiming the palace’s centre, so it answers with a stoa, as long as the square’s north side asks. The two courts are compelled by light, since a deep block of galleries needs light on both faces. The rotunda is compelled by sequence, one room between the city and the collections. Take away the stair hall and the museum loses its one point of return to the city. What resists the test: the attic exists to hide the dome, a decision of decorum rather than need; the painting galleries needed screen walls the plan had not provided for; and eighteen columns are more than any use of the portico requires.

Score: 8.4 / 10

What the building brings into the open, and what holds: that art and antiquity belong to the public and to the state rather than to the king’s cabinet, and that the formation of citizens, Bildung, is a civic function as weighty as the palace across the square. It says this in space, standing as an equal opposite the palace, its front a stoa open to anyone who climbs the steps. The stair hall discloses a second thing: from inside the institution of culture one looks back through the columns over the square to the city and the seat of power, framed. That is a true account of what the museum became in the nineteenth century. Held below the gate: the same proposition was being made in Munich and London in the same years, and much of what the building gives is a mood of calm, ordered nobility, which ranks below a meaning.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Height comes chiefly in two places. The rotunda: a round, top-lit room under a coffered dome, the ring of columns and the gallery above, the light falling from the oculus onto the statues; it is the Pantheon at a smaller scale, and it works. And the colonnade seen from the square in raking light, eighteen columns in one even rhythm, the shadow behind them deep, the whole front a single held breath. The stair hall gives a third moment, the view out through the columns from above. Frequency is moderate: the galleries are galleries, the courts give light to them, and the exterior beyond the front is plain. The register is serene grandeur, not terror or transport. The loss of the frescoes, which once gave the colonnade wall colour and narrative, lowers what the front now gives.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Built into plan and section, not evoked. The museum is the house of the Muses, and Schinkel builds the sequence of a temple precinct: the public steps, the stoa at the threshold, and at the centre a round room under a dome open to the sky, heaven’s figure, in which images of the gods stand in a ring. The visitor passes from the agora through the porch into the sanctuary before entering the treasuries round the courts. The archetype carries load: the rotunda is the centre the plan is organised from, and the hidden dome makes the sanctuary an interior secret, found rather than announced. The particular stays particular: a Prussian institution of the 1820s, a king’s foundation facing his palace. Held below the gate because the cosmos is quoted, from the Pantheon and from Durand, and the sanctuary is a sanctuary of art, a modern displacement of the sacred that the building stages more than it founds.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance: the Neoclassical public building with a pedimented temple front at its centre; the domed museum of the ideal plans, Durand’s and the prize projects of the French Academy; the princely gallery in a palace wing. The departure: a front with no pediment and no centre, eighteen equal columns across the whole face, the stoa set in place of the temple; the dome withdrawn from the skyline and hidden in a plain block; an open stair hall that makes the threshold a public outdoor room with a view; Durand’s ideal plan halved and made to fit a real site. The stake was real: a state building on the most prominent square of the capital, set as the palace’s equal, refusing the expected monumental accent before king and court. Held at the gate, not above it: every element is drawn from the classical vocabulary, and the turn is a reordering of known parts rather than a new language.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The form changes how the purpose is lived, more than in most museums. The sequence is the instruction: from the open square, up the steps, into the shadow of the colonnade, up the stair with the city behind, then into the rotunda, where the visitor is made ready, by a room of one shape and one light, for what follows. Give the front a temple portico and the museum stops being a public place and becomes a monument; remove the rotunda and the visitor enters the collection straight from the street. The building knows that seeing art is a passage from the city into another order and back, and the view from the stair hall completes the circuit. Held below the top: the galleries round the courts are serviceable rooms whose form says little, and with the painted walls lost, part of the sequence is now read rather than lived.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over promise, and the evidence is strong. The building has been studied without pause since Schinkel published it in his own plates: as the founding monument of the public museum, as the type of the Neoclassical civic building, as a lesson in proportion, and, in the late twentieth century, as the starting point of critical writing on the museum as an institution. Architects keep returning to it as a source, for its podium and column hall, its rotunda and the view from its stair. Formal depth holds on return: the relation of the hidden dome to the plain block, the stoa’s refusal of a centre, the way the stair hall reverses the gaze. What holds it level with the rest: the galleries yield little on a second visit, and much of the return is to a few moves, the front, the rotunda and the stair, rather than to an inexhaustible interior.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Opened in 1830 and published by its maker, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high: here the public art museum takes its definitive form as a building type, a civic front, a central domed hall, galleries in sequence round courts, an institution set opposite the state, for a type then barely thirty years old. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the colonnade and rotunda museum became the model for public museums through the nineteenth century in Germany, Britain and America; the Museum Island grew behind it; and in the twentieth century it was answered directly by Mies van der Rohe, in the podium and column hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and by Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, whose open rotunda is a reading of Schinkel’s. The discount: other public museums were begun in Munich in 1816 and in London in 1823, so the founding of the type is shared.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Weighed on form, use and fabric together. Nearly two centuries have passed since the opening. The form is whole and legible: the front, the block, the attic, the courts and the rotunda stand as designed, and the form has been copied and answered for two centuries. The use survives: a museum from 1830 and a museum now, interrupted from the war to 1966. The fabric bears a heavy charge. The building was gutted by fire at the end of the Second World War and its interiors were rebuilt by later hands; the fresco cycle of the colonnade and the stair hall is lost; and how far the rebuilt interiors reproduce Schinkel’s finish and the openness of his stair hall is not settled here. Losses of fabric and finish take less than a loss of form would, but more than restoration alone, and the axis stands lower for them than its span and its whole form would put it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The front is among the most exact pieces of Neoclassical design in Europe: eighteen columns in an unbroken rhythm, an entablature with no ornament beyond what the order requires, the corner piers stopping the run with authority, the attic set back so that the block reads as one figure. The rotunda’s proportion, coffering and top light are handled with complete control. The building was raised on piles over a filled arm of the river, a real difficulty met without failure, and the fitting of Durand’s ideal to a real site is a demonstration of skill. What holds it below the top: the dome is a conventional structure hidden inside a box, the painting galleries needed screen walls to light their pictures, and the courts are serviceable rather than resolved. The making carries the building at the front and in the rotunda; elsewhere it is excellent and plain.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs: the Greek trabeated order and the elementary geometry of square, circle and rectangle. Take the two most distant elements, the long open stoa facing the city and the closed, round, top-lit sanctuary at the centre. They obey the one law: post and beam outside, the same columns in a ring inside, the circle set within the rectangle as the dome is set within the attic. The relation of outside and inside, open line and closed centre, is the building’s argument, and it holds from the steps to the oculus. The range is real but not wide: one order, one material character, one register of calm. The hidden dome is the one place where the law bends toward a stage effect, a centre kept secret from the city, and even that agrees with the stoa’s refusal of a centre outside. Narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here holds across a moderate range.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The orders held: the state, in a king’s foundation set opposite his palace; the public and the city, in the stoa on the square and the view from the stair; education and the formation of citizens; history and antiquity, the matter of the collection the plan was made for; and the sacred, displaced into art and housed in the rotunda. One sequence integrates them; they are not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or outside: the household, labour except as the piles hidden below, the natural order beyond the light from the oculus, death, and the life of anyone who is not a visitor. A single institution in a single figure holds more than a villa and less than a city or a cathedral, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10