Dr. Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery and of the British Museum, both in London.
He presented a lecture titled: “A new museum for Berlin”.
In the heart of Berlin, the old town palace of the Kings and the Kaisers is being rebuilt with a very different purpose: to house great collections of the cultures of East Asia, Africa, America and Oceania. Scheduled to open around the end of 2019, it will be called the Humboldt-Forum, in honour of the two Berlin brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in the early nineteenth century, pioneered a new way of thinking globally about human cultures and the natural environment. Along with museum galleries, there will also be exhibition spaces, where, drawing on all the collections of Berlin, themes of universal interest may be explored.