Daniel Libeskind’s winning design boldly interrupts the original building’s symmetry. The extension, a massive, five-story 140-ton wedge of glass, concrete and steel, cuts through the 135-year-old former arsenal’s structural order. A 98-foot high viewing platform provides breathtaking views of modern Dresden while pointing in the opposite direction toward the source of the fire-bombs, creating a dramatic space for reflection.
The new façade’s openness and transparency contrasts with the opacity and rigidity of the existing building. The latter represents the severity of the authoritarian past while the former reflects the openness of the democratic society in which it has been reimagined. The interplay between these perspectives forms the character of the new Military History Museum
Inside, in the original, columned part of the building, German’s military history is presented in chronological order. But now it is complemented, in the new wide-open spaces of the five-story wedge, by new exhibition areas with a new focus on thematic consideration of the societal forces and human impulses that create a culture of violence.
The Bundeswehr Military History Museum (German: Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr) is the military museum of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, and one of the major military history museums in Germany. The museum is under the technical and administrative chain of command of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office. It is located in a former military arsenal in the Albertstadt neighborhood of Dresden. The arsenal, an enormous, neo-classical building, was decommissioned and became a military museum.
Image: Die Hauptfassade kurz vor der Fertigstellung. (Quelle: MHM)