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The back wall [of the Lustgarten facade of the Altes Museum] is to be decorated with frescos bearing some relation to the purpose of the building. Those paintings, seen through the columns, are intended to lend serenity to the building.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
With time the rear wall of the hall can be decorated with a row of murals, perhaps with a cycle of pictures from the evolutionary history of mankind, which would be a worthy challange for the most important talents Your Majesty would feel worthy of such a commission.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
...among [Schinkel's] figure paintings is the series of sketches he made between 1828 and 1834 for the fresco decorations to the vestibule of the Museum am Lustgarten, built between 1823 and 1830. The frescos were not executed until after Schinkel's death, and they were very largely destroyed in 1945. Echoing the famous Stoa Poikile in Athens, they were meant to be visible to everyone from outside and to set the contents of the building -- antique sculpture and modern paintings -- in the context of the whole cosmos.
Helmut Börsch-Supan
The question still remains whether cyberspace can sucessfully inform real world architecture. To this end I propose a "cyber" project for the real world to consider:
Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin originally had two long murals within its colonnaded porch; they were destroyed at the end of WWII and not restored. The murals depicted an allegorical history of civilization, and I now propose a "hyper" restoration of the mural. As such, the new "hypermural" can depict "civilization" as it actually occurs, along with depicting any numbers of other images either static or moving.
Stephen Lauf
e-mail to Marcus Ormerod and Merlyna Lim, 4 August 1998
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Altes Museum, original rendition of Lustgarten elevation, K. F. Schinkel, 1822
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Stephen Lauf, Hypermural for the Altes Museum (Berlin: www.quondam.com, 1998.08.23), partial view of front elevation.
        
Gwathmey Siegal & Associates, James S. McDonnell Hall of Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1998), images: 2000.03.05.
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