Building
The facilities of the Museum Koenig Bonn are made up of buildings, animal enclosures and parks that were built at different times and served different functions. The entire complex is a listed building because of its importance to the history of science.
The southern part of the building, the so-called Koenig Villa, is the oldest. It served as a residence and housed the core of Alexander Koenig's collections. However, the current building is younger, as the villa was rebuilt on the foundation walls after its destruction in the Second World War.
To the north of the villa is the old private museum, the construction of which was commissioned by Alexander Koenig in 1898. It mainly housed Koenig's extensive bird collections.
In 1912, the Ornithological Museum was extended by a spacious museum building. The main building still houses the museum's exhibition today and was reopened in 2003 after extensive refurbishment.
Behind the main building, connected to it by a glass tunnel, a new building was constructed, named Clas M. Naumann-Bau after its former director. It houses the arthropod collections, the main library, laboratories and seminar and office rooms.
Villa of "Mr Professor König"
On the occasion of his graduation from the University of Greifswald and his marriage to Margarethe Westphal in 1884, Alexander Koenig received a house on Coblenzer Straße from his father Leopold Koenig, which the latter had already acquired in 1873, as a gift. Alexander moved into the building, which had already been built in 1860, after extensive remodelling, including the creation of a magnificent villa garden with animal enclosures, which is still preserved today in a slightly modified form. The entire upper floor of the "Villa des Herrn Professor König" was reserved for collections.
The villa burnt down in 1944/45 after being hit by bombs, with the exception of the reception room, and was rebuilt in 1949 under the direction of Rudolf Feld in a simpler form as an institute building. Today, parts of the vertebrate department are housed there.
The Ornithological Museum
After Alexander Koenig's collections had grown considerably as a result of extensive research trips, he had a 22 metre long and 12 metre wide, two-storey extension built to his villa in 1898 as the "Ornithological Museum". The plans for the museum were drawn up by the Bonn master builder Otto Penner, who also gave the Villa Leopold Koenig (today: Villa Hammerschmidt) its familiar shape. The new museum building was set back a few metres from the villa and connected to it by a shared portal, on the right-hand side of which a lion sculpture from the Berlin workshop of Christian Daniel Rauch was placed. The new museum building towered over the villa and was crowned by a surrounding sandstone balustrade with an imperial eagle on top.
The museum building was completed in 1900. It housed the entire ornithological collections as well as flats for staff. This building and its interior were modelled on the Rothschild Museum in Tring, which at the time set professional standards that Alexander Koenig adopted in his new building.
Main building
With the fortune he inherited from his father, Alexander Koenig planned to expand his private ornithological museum, built in 1900, with a "uniform, spacious museum". After extensive land purchases, the foundation stone for the building was laid on 3 September 1912 according to plans by the Berlin court architect Gustav Holland. The Museum of Natural History in Berlin was presumably the architectural model. The shell of the building was constructed by the Frankfurt company Philipp Holzmann. When the shell was completed in 1914, the building was confiscated and used as a military hospital for wounded soldiers of the First World War and also for occupying troops after 1918. The confiscation of the building was only lifted on 11 February 1926.
As a result of the inflation, Koenig had lost most of his assets. Only after difficult negotiations with the Prussian state was it possible to secure the takeover and continuation of the institute in 1929. The museum was officially opened on 13 May 1934.
Complete refurbishment of the main building (1998-2003)
The renovation of the main building was planned by the architectural office Schommer, Bonn. The architectural office Kühnel BDA, Bonn, was responsible for the construction management. The construction task was to renovate the museum from the ground up. The entire building services installations had to be renewed and the existing deficiencies in terms of fire protection and escape and rescue routes had to be rectified, taking strict account of the preservation of historical monuments. All exhibition areas were covered with oak parquet flooring and given new lighting. The linear, suspended luminaires were each arranged in the centre of the rectangular coffered ceiling. The specially developed luminaires emit indirect light and have a power track in the lower section so that individual spotlights can be used later to provide differentiated lighting for the exhibits. The partially rounded high marble skirting boards have been reworked and supplemented. Most of the windows were reconstructed in their old appearance. The windows were fitted with sliding translucent panel curtains made of light-coloured fabric on the inside, which, together with the new glazing, reduce UV radiation and control the amount of daylight to which the very sensitive animal specimens are exposed. The new, very restrained design also included the extensions to the foyer, in particular the installation of a glass vestibule and a new reception desk, as well as the cafeteria and the museum shop. The result is a new old Museum Koenig, discreetly modernised and unobtrusively embellished.
Planning: Architekturbüro Schommer, Bonn
Construction management: Architekturbüro Kühnel BDA, Bonn
Client: Bau- und Liegenschaftsbetrieb NRW, Bonn
Clas M. Naumann Building
The NRW Ministry of Science and Research approved the final spatial plan for the new building on 30 August 1995. Construction was scheduled to begin in 1997. In the summer of 1995, massive and extremely serious damage to the installation was discovered during repair work on the electrical system of the display cases. In February 1996, the Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Construction of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia decided on immediate measures for the complete refurbishment of the old building.
The basic refurbishment of the old building was begun in 1997, the plans for the new building were suspended "for three to four years" (until the basic refurbishment was "fully financed"). Planning for the new building was resumed in January 2002. However, the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia had to decide on the authorisation again.
On 8 September 2003, work began on the excavation pit (initially for the archaeological excavations). Prof. Dr. C.M. Naumann died on 15 February 2004, one day before the start of the construction site installation. The actual construction work began on 1 March 2004, and on 5 March 2004 the directorate of the then ZFMK decided to name the new building the "Clas M. Naumann Building" at the suggestion of staff members.
The foundation stone was laid on 15 April 2004 and the topping-out ceremony was celebrated on 8 October 2004 in the presence of the then Minister for Urban Development and Housing, Culture and Sport, Dr Michael Vesper, and the Mayor of Bonn, Bärbel Dieckmann.