Märkisches Museum
Founded in 1874 as the museum of the city of Berlin and its political region, the March of Brandenburg, it occupies a building on the northern edge of Köllnischer Park, facing the Spree, which was designed by Ludwig Hoffmann and completed in 1908.
[6] In addition, Berlin in the "Gründerzeit" was full of demolitions and excavations, which yielded both fragments of old buildings and prehistoric and medieval finds.
76 entries were received, but the winning design, by Wilhelm Möller, proved on examination to be both unsuitable and too expensive, and the architect had died,[3][10][11] so the project was shelved.
[12][13] Creating a new building for the museum was the first large task for Ludwig Hoffmann after his appointment in 1896 as Stadtbaurat (chief of construction) for the city of Berlin.
Meanwhile, in 1899, in advance of the demolition of the Cölln town hall, some of the collection had been placed in storage and some shown in temporary quarters on the first floor of one of the city's covered markets, until 1904.
[12] For example, the low vaulted ceilings and roughly plastered walls on the ground floor were intended to suggest great age and housed the displays on prehistory, where the display cases for funerary urns and flint axes were rough in form; the setting for the medieval altars and sculptures was a vaulted Gothic chapel echoing medieval church interiors;[18] weapons were shown in a room with thick columns, recalling a monastery;[12] and rococo porcelain and snuffboxes were displayed in elegant vitrines in a light and airy room on the second floor.
He left Hoffmann's gallery displays largely untouched, but did introduce electric lighting in 1932, over the objections of the now retired architect.
When the war ended, the museum was located in the Soviet sector of Berlin which became the capital of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
In a restoration which took place from 1953 to 1958,[12] the interior was subdivided by partitions and lowered ceilings,[20] increasingly destroying Hoffmann's gallery scheme, and museum staff were required to present history on a Marxist–Leninist basis.
Founded in 1962, this was housed in the baroque Collegienhaus of the former Kammergericht in the Lindenstraße in Kreuzberg,[3] and the collection was limited to cultural history so that the two museums could be eventually reunited with as few problems as possible.
[17] The Senate of Berlin plans to unify currently scattered holdings in Mitte, in and around the Märkisches Museum, and has thus projected an extension to the building, which is to incorporate the nearby Marinehaus, designed by Otto Liesheim and built in 1908–10.
[18] The Senate acquired that building in 1993, and the architectural competition to design the extension and conversion was won by the London firm of Stanton Williams in 2008.
The Marinehaus is to be used for especially popular displays on the history of Berlin in the 20th century while the original building undergoes thorough restoration, and the foundation continues to operate museums in the 18th-century Knoblauchhaus,[42] the rococo Ephraim Palais,[43] and St. Nicholas' Church,[44] all in the nearby Nikolaiviertel.
