Am Kupfergraben 10

About this place

Standing across the Kupfergraben canal from Museum Island, this 2007 building by David Chipperfield Architects is a quietly radical piece of urban infill. Conceived as a townhouse dedicated to art, it answers Berlin’s patchy streetscape not with a glass statement but with a solid, load-bearing brick mass whose irregular window openings track the differing room heights inside. The recessed mortar and hand-laid brick give the façade a weight and shadow that ties it to the surrounding nineteenth-century stone, while the cut of the windows is unmistakably contemporary. Inside, generously proportioned rooms with high ceilings and oak floors were designed as flexible galleries lit by tall windows framing the Pergamon and the canal. The building won first prize in the Fritz Höger brick-architecture award in 2008. In 2019 its owners donated it to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which converted the interiors into a ‘Centre for Cultural Education’ for the Berlin State Museums. It remains one of the clearest small-scale demonstrations of Chipperfield’s belief that new architecture should repair the city quietly rather than shout over it.