Royal Prussian Library, Berlin, Germany - Baroque Architecture on Waymarking.com

The Royal Prussian Library was designed by Michael Philipp Boumann and Georg Christian Unger and was built between 1775 and 1780. It soon became the largest collection of books in German language.

By order of King Frederick the Great, the architects used old blueprints of the north wing of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, designed 50 years earlier by Austrian architect Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach. Ironically, Fischer's dedign of the Hofburg Palace was not finished until 1893, thus the copy was finished 113 years before the original.

King Frederick the Great ordered the library to be open to all people, making it the first institution of higher education in Germany, that was not limited to royalty.

In 1910, the library reached its maximum capacity of 2.1 million books. Thus, the library moved into a new, larger building, the Berlin State Library and the building has since been used by several universities. Today, it hosts the law school of the prestigious Humboldt University.

Berlin's citizens are known for their somewhat disrespectful sense of humor. Because of its style, the building is commonly known as "The Commode."

There is a large Latin inscription at the main entrance, reading nutrimentum spiritus, meaning "intellectual nourishment." Urban folklore, however, uses a different translation of the word spiritus, translating it to "Alcohol is a food group."