Rebirth Of A Museum

Sweden’s Nationalmuseum, one of the largest museums built in the 19th century, is wowing visitors with its five-year refurbishment

- Suman Tarafdar

Gazing out over the water to the picture-perfect postcard view of the Royal Palace and the Stadsholmen, Stockholm’s historic city centre, it is easy to forget that this particular view has opened up after nearly a century, and is just one of the side benefits of the six-year long, £100m renovation of Sweden’s Nationalmuseum; its biggest museum of art and design.

The Nationalmuseum, a vast repository of more than 700,000 works (before the renovation it could display just 1,700) ranging from Renaissance masters to modern installations, is a mammoth 19th-century waterfront neo-Renaissance building. Designed by Friedrich August Stüler, the prolific Prussian architect of the Neues Museum in Berlin, it was one of the few buildings of the time to be originally built as a museum. With the arrival of electricity the 300 windows were covered, in order to increase the amount of wall space for presenting more art. However, this move led to giving the interiors a bit of a gloomy and cramped feel.