Which architect designed the Altes Museum in Berlin?

Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed the Altes Museum in Berlin. Commissioned by King Frederick William III of Prussia, Schinkel created the building as a public museum for the royal art collections and a major statement of German Neoclassicism.

Schinkel planned the museum in the early 1820s as part of a civic and cultural ensemble around the Lustgarten on Berlin’s Museum Island. Its monumental Ionic colonnade faces the garden, while the interior includes a grand rotunda inspired by ancient architecture. The design made art and education accessible to the public rather than keeping the royal collection entirely private.

Construction began in 1825 and the building opened in 1830 as the Königliches Museum, or Royal Museum. It was renamed the Altes Museum, meaning “Old Museum,” after the Neues Museum opened nearby in 1855. The museum’s classical vocabulary—strict symmetry, columns, portico, and rotunda—made it one of the defining works of nineteenth-century German Neoclassical architecture.

Gottfried Semper and Leo von Klenze were also important nineteenth-century museum architects, but neither designed Berlin’s Altes Museum. Schinkel’s name is the canonical answer.