Foundation strengthening/new foundations to the historically sensitive structure of the Pergamon Museum on the Museum Island in central Berlin. The three‐wing building for the presentation of mostly large classical objects was built between 1910 and 1936 and after 100 years requires thorough refurbishment. In order to regain complete museum functionality and provide the correct climatic conditions for the exhibited objects, extensive strengthening measures, new foundations and lowering of the basement inverts are unavoidable.
The extensive archived documents showed that the Pergamon Museum is founded at several levels at a depth of between 6 and 18 m below ground level. The deep geological scouring in the foundation formation led to great problems with the planned raft foundation after soil exchange under the protection of dewatering. The available results of the soil survey from 1912 in the area of the south wing, which until then had been built over, showed that the organic scouring extended down to about –12 m below sea level. This demanded a fundamental alteration of the foundation in this building section. Neither the dewatering plant nor the deep foundation elements available in 1912 were capable of reaching the loadbearing ground about 45 m below ground level.
The stringent requirements for the deformation behaviour of the existing structures and in particular the south wing of the Pergamon Museum, which remained in use during the refurbishment works, required appropriate monitoring of reactions, which had to be constantly compared during the construction works. Both vibration and settlement curves were recorded and used as a decisive criterion for the selection of possible refurbishment technologies from specialised civil engineering. The solutions selected on site, both in the completion phase and in the current refurbishment phase, are described and discussed in this article.