Adolphe feder biography of martin

Paris, France

Paris, France

Paris, France

There’s a grand new building on Berlin’s Museum Island: the James Simon Galerie. Some people think it’s an architectural masterpiece, but the Berliner Zeitung dismissed it as“the most expensive cloakroom in the world.” A dramatic expanse of glossy white stone skirting the river Spree in the heart of the German capital, the James Simon Galerie is, perhaps, both of these things. For it is unquestionably a beautiful building: The sleek white colonnade and imposing stairway echo the classical idiom of the great museums that surround it, but in a chilly, deliberately modern key. And yet it is only an adjunct to them, a place for visitors to enter, buy tickets, leave their coats, and move on. It is a building that towers over you as you approach it. But viewed from across the water, it appears as a sliver of contemporary elegance overshadowed by the massive stone bulk of the Pergamon Museum to which it gives access, a building whose properly monumental scale reflects the drama and ambition of the famous archaeological reconstructions within.

At 134 million euros, the James Simon Galerie is certainly a costly undertaking, one that asserts Berlin’s ambition to be a capital of world culture like London, New York, and Paris. It is the city’s answer to the dramatic glass pyramid that

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