Wednesday, December 28, 2011

And yet without decoration.

The Neues Museum was born from the destruction of the old. Bombed in February 1945, the greatest of treasures were safely hidden in the zoo, and all else was incinerated and crushed.

The old museum lives in the new, with salvaged pieces of ornamentation pressed into the walls where they would have been, surrounded by new and blank plaster, so that the ghost of that majestic hall lives superimposed in splinters and fragments over the present day.

There are bullet holes in the walls that did not require replacing



The story is not only in the contents of the rooms. The foundations have memory.

1 comment:

  1. fascinating! makes me want to visit there.

    need a baggage handler next trip? :-)

    ReplyDelete