Towards the centre

The new SPK magazine is dedicated to the centre of Berlin. What is the heart of Berlin? And how did it become what it is?

Imagine you are walking from the Brandenburg Gate towards Museum Island in 2020: soon you will see the completed State Library on your left, resplendent in its former glory, combined with a state-of-the-art reading room. A little further on to the right is the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, a little further still the (almost) completed Museum Island with its new entrance building, the James-Simon-Galerie, and on the other side of the Lustgarten the Humboldt Forum in the new Berlin Palace, behind it Schinkel's rebuilt Bauakademie as the new Berlin Architecture Museum.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is shaping this new centre of Berlin with its five buildings on Museum Island, the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art in the Humboldt Forum and the State Library on Unter den Linden. A democratic landscape of culture and knowledge will emerge, inviting us to better understand the world in which we live. But how do you build with this history in mind for the visitors of tomorrow? Why can't we get away from the modernity of Karl Friedrich Schinkel? And who does it actually belong to, this centre of Berlin?