Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, 1825-1830

The Altes Museum (old museum), German's first formal museum of art and history, seamlessly displays the beauty of German nature and artistry with regal Grecian stature. Located on the Spree Island in Berlin, Germany, it serves as one of the nation's most treasured Neoclassical works of architecture. Built between 1825 and 1830 by Berlin's most renowned architect of the time, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the museum actually served as a complement to the impressive Pleasure Garden of the Spree Island.

Princess Louise of Prussia, the daughter of Fredrich Wilhelm, King of Prussia, built the garden over the course of the seventeenth century as a refuge in Prussian territory. Almost a century and a half later, one of Fredrich Wilhelm's successors sought to expand the artistic influence of the Spree Island and built the museum as a haven for the treasures of German culture, mostly to keep them away from the French. The museum thrived for approximately a century, acquiring an extensive collection of Grecian masks and iconic statues even through periods of war and political tension. During the rise of national Fascism, the Altes Museum was the subject of many propaganda publications, and because of its increase popularity, multiple German painters donated some of the nation's most spectacular frescos.

Yet at the start of the Second World War, a tank explosion destroyed the Pleasure Garden and much of the museum, destroying nearly all of the walls of the Altes Museum. After a period of post-war restoration that resulted in the museum's closure from 1951 through 1965, it reopened with a newly added Romanesque rotunda and sculpture garden (commemorative of the Pleasure Garden that was unable to be recovered after the war). The building continues to be one of Berlin's most prestigious structures of the nineteenth century, combining the revival of Grecian architecture with the magnificence of the Neo-classical Germany.