Museum History
The building was constructed from 1873-77 as an Arsenal on Dresden’s Olbrichtplatz. Installed on the ground floor were the guns of the Saxon army and the upper floors were used as a depot for arms and edged weapons. In 1914, the Saxon army museum was established in the arsenal. After World War I it was abandoned as a military depot. In 1940, the museum was renamed the Army Museum and remained opened until 1945. After the war the Red Army seized large parts of the collection which were taken to the Soviet Union. The Army Museum was subsequently dissolved.
The building was acquired by the city of Dresden and was known as "North Hall" until 1967. Then it became the city museum with exhibitions and other events, including the Striezelmarkt. The first exhibition on the reconstruction of Dresden was shown in the North Hall.
The East German Army museum founded in 1961 in Potsdam was moved to the Arsenal buildings in Dresden in 1972. The focus of Army Museum exhibition was the history of East Germany’s National People's Army and their Warsaw Pact allies. The Soviet Union returned large portions of the holdings of the Saxon army museum which were also exhibited. In 1990 the Ministry of Defense renamed the museum the "Military History Museum."
After the reunification of Germany, the Ministry of Defense Minister Volker Ruhe, decided in 1994 to renovate the museum and make it the new site of the Central Museum of the Bundeswehr. In 2001, the city opened an architectural competition in an effort to breathe new life into the old building, stipulating that they hoped to find a submission that ‘changed the way we think about war’. Similar to I.M. Pei’s 1989 glass pyramid in the Paris Musée du Louvre palace, and Rafael Moneo’s addition to the Madrid Prado, the Museum hoped to retain their original structure while connecting additional gallery space.
The selected design - called Dresden Shard - was created by a Polish-American-based architect Daniel Libeskind. The result was a ninety-eight foot high, 14,500 ton, wedge of concrete and steel that cuts through the 19th century stone arsenal. Emerging from the symmetry of the original Arsenal, the shard–like wedge appears stark yet open in form, utilizing strips of metal to allow the effect of transparency and lightness. The construction lasted for six years, and cost the German Military eighty-six million dollars.
Read more about this topic: Bundeswehr Military History Museum
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