The Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has won a competition to build a new museum of 20th-century art in central Berlin with a long, low red-brick design that invited comparisons to a rail station, a barn, a temple and an indoor market.The site for the new museum is between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s metal-and-glass Neue Nationalgalerie and Hans Scharoun’s spiky gold Philharmonic, two architectural landmarks of the 1960s. It is also flanked on one side by Friedrich August Stüler’s red-brick 19th-century St Matthäus Kirche.

The winning design “doesn’t attempt to compete with the ‘divas’ by Scharoun and Mies van der Rohe,” said Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, at a press conference today (27 October). “But it still makes a very strong statement. It achieves an almost impossible feat by healing this place and bringing together these buildings.”

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