James Simon Gallery, Museum entrance building at Museum Island, Germany

The James Simon Gallery is a long, narrow visitor centre on Museum Island, built 2009–2018 to David Chipperfield's design between the Kupfergraben canal and the Neues Museum. A pale stone base with a dark doorway carries a colonnade of 70 slender white concrete columns, almost nine metres high and under 30 centimetres thick, behind which glass panels sit; the name JAMES-SIMON-GALERIE is set on a plain wall beside it. A broad three-flight staircase leads up to the columned terrace.

David Chipperfield won the 1999 competition for the entrance building with a plain cubic design in steel and satin glass; planning halted in 2002 over costs, and the Bundestag approved 73 million euros in November 2006. After further revisions and a citizens' initiative against the design, the foundation stone was laid on 18 October 2013 following foundation work with 1,200 piles. The gallery opened on 12 July 2019, cost 134 million euros and took almost ten years to build.

The gallery is named after Henri James Simon, a Jewish patron whose donations of artwork and artifacts brought worldwide fame to the Berlin State Museums. The choice of a prolific Jewish donor as namesake was meant to recognize other Jewish donors whose names were removed from German museums during the Third Reich.

The visit is worthwhile because you can access all the island's museums from here, as the building sits in a central location. Inside you'll find ticket counters, information centers, shops, and restaurants, everything needed for a full day of museum exploring.

The colonnade's 70 white concrete columns stand almost nine metres high but are less than 30 centimetres thick. Critics noted the row's resemblance to the colonnades at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, while architecture critic Nikolaus Bernau compared the building's arrangement to the temples at the Acropolis stairway and called it "Berlin's Nike temple".