James Simon Galerie

About this place

The James Simon Galerie is the last and most public piece of David Chipperfield Architects' two-decade engagement with Berlin's Museumsinsel. Named after James Simon, the Jewish merchant and philanthropist who funded many of the island's original excavations, it opened in 2019 as the shared entrance, ticketing hub, and event space for all five museums on the island. The building occupies a long narrow site on the western bank of the Kupfergraben canal, and its form — a raised piano nobile set on a rusticated base, fronted by a deep colonnade of tapering stone columns — is in direct conversation with Schinkel's Altes Museum across the water. Chipperfield resists any literal historicism: the columns are unfluted and abstract, the stonework is precise rather than ornate, the proportions are classical in spirit but contemporary in execution. The building is simultaneously at home on the island and clearly of its own time. The staircase ascending from canal level to the main hall is the building's great set piece — a monumental outdoor flight in honey-coloured stone that draws the city into the building and gives the approach a civic weight appropriate to the island as a whole. The main hall inside is calm and generously scaled, with light entering through the colonnade and filtering through the sequence of spaces. For anyone visiting the island's museums, the Galerie provides an arrival experience that the individual museum entrances never could. As a piece of architecture in its own right, it is one of Chipperfield's most assured works: confident in its references, restrained in its detail, and entirely committed to serving its context.