Winner of the prestigious Mies van der Rohe 2011 Award, The Neues Museum on Berlin's Museum Island was originally designed by Friedrich August Stüler and built between 1841 and 1859.  In 1997, David Chipperfield Architects won the international competition for the rebuilding of the Neues Museum in collaboration with Julian Harrap.  The design focused on repairing and restoring the original volume, respecting the historical structure.  Both the restoration and repair of the existing is driven by the idea that the original structure should be emphasized in its spatial context and original materiality , the new reflects the lost without imitating it.

The key aim of the project was to recomplete the original volume of the parts that remained after the destruction of the Second World War. The original sequence of rooms was restored with new building sections that create continuity with the existing structure. The archaeological restoration followed the guidelines of the Charter of Venice, respecting the historical structure in its different states of preservation. All the gaps in the existing structure were filled in without competing with the existing structure in terms of brightness and surface.

The new exhibition rooms are built of large format pre-fabricated concrete elements consisting of white cement mixed with Saxonian marble chips. Formed from the same concrete elements, the new main staircase repeats the original without replicating it, and sits within a majestic hall that is preserved only as a brick volume, devoid of its original ornamentation. Other new volumes – the Northwest wing, with the Egyptian court and the Apollo risalit, the apse in the Greek courtyard, and the South Dome – are built of recycled handmade bricks, complementing the preserved sections.