Neues Museum

The Neues Museum stands on Berlin's Museum Island, originally completed in 1859 to a design by the architect Friedrich August Stuler as part of the wider museum complex begun decades earlier by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The building was heavily damaged by Allied bombing during the Second World War and left as a roofless ruin for more than sixty years through the divided city's Cold War decades, its restoration only beginning after German reunification. The British architect David Chipperfield led the museum's reconstruction, completed in 2009, deliberately leaving visible scars of wartime damage and exposed original brickwork alongside new construction rather than disguising the building's history behind a seamless historical reproduction, an approach that itself became widely influential in later heritage restoration projects. The rebuilt museum today houses the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection, including the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, one of the most visited single art objects in Germany.