Work is behind schedule on an ambitious new culture and exhibition space set for a reconstructed Baroque palace in Berlin, causing the opening to be pushed back from September this year to a yet-to-be-determined date in 2020.
Some building services, including the central air conditioning, will need to be adapted after technical evaluation on the Humboldt Forum, which is taking shape in the reconstructed Berlin Palace, destroyed by the East German government in 1950.
This means stage-by-stage opening cannot begin until 2020, announced Petra Wesseler, president of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), on 12 June.
Wesseler said that a subterranean climate control system had been wrongly programmed, and that pipework was blocking emergency exit routes, newspaper The Guardian reported.Â
Also unfinished is a roof-top restaurant, and more building needed on the ground floor, basement and other areas, Wesseler said.
Planned since 2007, construction commenced in June 2012, with work on the shell beginning in March 2013.
Until spring 2018, the chairmanship of the Board of Trustees lay with the then Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMUB).
But after the new government was formed in 2018, the chairmanship was transferred to the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM).
A new overall timetable will be announced on 26 June 2019.
Image: The Humboldt Forum is taking shape in the reconstructed Berlin Palace, destroyed by the East German government in 1950 (www.humboldtforum.org)
