The Bode Museum was built at the turn of the 20th century as the fourth building on Berlin’s Museum Island on its western tip, which is now separated by the route of the city railroad opened in 1882.

A double-shell dome crowns the magnificent entrance hall. It was initially intended to be much flatter. It was only in the course of the long planning history that the outer dome, with its finally realised height of almost 40 m, developed into a dominant feature that still shapes the cityscape today.

However, the steel structure, which was built in 1903/04, is particularly exciting from a technical point of view: the neo-baroque shape conceals a statically highly sophisticated with an unusual load transfer.