In October 2006, the refurbished Bode Museum on the Berlin Museum Island was handed over to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Commissioned by the German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR), pbr AG from Osnabrück was responsible for the design of the technical building services.

After a construction period of five-and-a-half years, the second milestone towards completing the Museum Island after the reopening of the Alte Nationalgalerie in 2001 was marked with a symbolic handing-over of keys in the presence of Federal Minister for Construction Tiefensee, State Minister for Culture Neumann and Berlin’s acting Mayor Wowereit. The Bode Museum at the northern tip of the Museum Island was built as the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in the Wilhelminian neo-Baroque style between 1898 and 1904 by Ernst Eberhard von Ihne. After damage suffered during the Second World War, the prestigious building was repaired provisionally in the 1950s and was renamed after its founder, Wilhelm von Bode.

The completed refurbishment project amounted to EUR 152 million. It included, immediately after reunification, the shoring up of any unsafe parts of the museums, technical and historic investigations, the design and implementation of fundamental repairs to the building and its integration into the masterplan for the Museum Island, including a new extension to link the building to the future Archaeological Promenade. In addition, new access routes had to be established to link up with the inner courtyard and new air-conditioning, lighting and security systems had to be installed.

The design for the fundamental repair of the museum produced by pbr Planungsbüro Rohling AG includes the air-conditioning of the exhibition areas, which have been provided for the presentation of sculptures and paintings. In view of the fact that the installation of a new air-conditioning system necessarily involves considerable interference in the building fabric, minimum requirements for conditioning the room air with the minimum of interference were established in cooperation with the user and the Listed Buildings Office. For the exhibition rooms along the Kupfergraben and the River Spree, an adapted solution with double air-change was developed for the air-conditioning in the form of a ventilation system with conditioned intake air and controlled discharge of the exhaust air, based on a simulated calculation for the air-conditioning. The air-conditioning system of the exhibition rooms uses horizontal fresh air outlets in the plinth area of the walls. The exhaust air is extracted via concealed joints in the picture rails into the void above the ceiling, and from there it is conducted upwards via ducts to the plant rooms.