Ark of arts – bridge of renewal
MúzeumCafé 20.
Germany’s oldest and second largest museum collection, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, primarily works in the Zwinger’s Old Picture Gallery and the Grünes Gewölbe, attracts millions of visitors to the city on the Elbe every year. For some, large-scale reconstruction of the Albertinum is giving rise to thoughts of a second Noah’s ark, while others talk of a bridge linking the past and the future. At last a bridge has been built in Dresden and no one protested against it! With these words (referring to the proposed bridge across the Elbe) the Berlin architect Volker Staab was congratulated when Dresden’s famous museum reopened last June. It then became visible to the public – though perhaps not very visible – how the museum building had been renewed in line with the architect’s plans, more precisely how expansion had occurred involving a construction 72 metres long, 24 metres wide, with 3540 square metres on two floors housing storerooms and workshops, which despite its 2700 tonnes floats at a height of 17 metres above an inner courtyard and is almost unnoticeable. Whoever entered the building before the damaging flood of 2002 and chanced to see the courtyard being used as a car park and temporary storage space, knows that it had no roof. Today there is no suspicion that the space is now covered not simply for protection against bad weather, but that there is a new museum unit which is rather like Noah’s ark in that it can protect the museum’s treasures in the event of another flood, while simultaneously being, metaphorically speaking, a bridge linking preservation of the building’s historical value and the creation of a new section in the spirit of 21st-century museum requirements. This duality of meaning characterised 2010 when the museum celebrated the 450th anniversary of the foundation of Dresden’s state art collection. by Saxon prince-elector Augustus I.