The Kolonnadenhof, Museum Island

On our trip to Berlin, we spent time exploring the museums on Museum Island. There was so much to see inside that it would have been easy to hurry from one collection to the next. Instead, we found ourselves lingering in the Kolonnadenhof, the garden shared by the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Neues Museum, and the Pergamon Museum. It gave us a chance to enjoy the museums as a place, as well as for the objects they held.

The courtyard had the order of a formal garden without feeling closed off. Low boxwood hedges traced geometric patterns across the ground, while large trees cast shade over the paths. Colonnades bordered the space, and the broad stairways of the Alte Nationalgalerie rose behind the sculptures. We could see people moving between buildings as we walked through the garden ourselves. Even outdoors, there was art to stop and look at.

The idea of a garden here reaches back to the nineteenth century. Architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel imagined a courtyard as part of Museum Island, and a garden was laid out in 1880. The space we walked through had later been redesigned using that history as its guide. Its carefully clipped hedges and open paths made a setting where visitors could pause between museums, just as we did.

From one side of the garden, we could see the Pergamon Museum; from another, the Alte Nationalgalerie. The buildings held very different collections, yet the courtyard brought them into one experience. We had come to Berlin eager to explore its museums, and this was one of the places where we could take a breath, talk about what we had seen, and decide where to go next.

I remember the pleasure of that pause: the shade of the trees, the sculptures among the hedges, and Marty standing in the middle of it all. Museum Island offered us remarkable works inside its buildings. The Kolonnadenhof reminded us that we could also find something memorable in the space between them.