Italian architect Franco Stella has completed his reconstruction of the baroque Berlin Palace, which was formerly home to Prussian kings and German emperors and will now house the Humboldt Forum museum.
Described as "the largest cultural development in Europe", the 40,000-square-metre museum stands on the site of the demolished East German parliament building alongside Berlin Cathedral on Museum Island.
Berlin Palace has been reconstructed as Humboldt Forum
Humboldt Forum occupies a reconstruction of Berlin Palace, a largely 18th-century palace designed by Andreas Schlüter that was the main residence of the Prussian and later the German monarchs.
Damaged during world war two, the palace was demolished and replaced by the Palace of the Republic, which housed the parliament of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany. Following unification in 1990, the parliament building was closed and then demolished to make way for the museum. The museum stands alongside Berlin Cathedral
Built around a steel frame with concrete cores, three of the museum's facades are replicas of the original palace, while the fourth is a modern stone facade designed by Stella.
To reconstruct the quince-coloured facades, sculptors and plaster moulders recreated 2,800 figures and approximately 22,000 different sandstone elements including windows, cornices and columns.
Three facades have been reconstructed and the fourth is modern
According to Stella, the museum was conce...