This July, Berlin will cut the ribbon on one of the most striking European metro stations to open in recent years.

The city’s new Museumsinsel (“Museum Island”) U-Bahn Station, set to receive its first passengers July 9, is an austere but dramatic space that not only tidies up one of Berlin’s longer-standing public transit boondoggles, but also explicitly references the city’s architectural heritage. Its interior, designed by Swiss architect Max Dudler, takes as its inspiration theater designs created by the figure who remains the best-known pre-modernist architect to have worked in Berlin — Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

Schinkel’s signature — as both creator and inspiration for later architects — is all over the city. Active in the early 19th century, when Berlin was still capital of Prussia rather than a united Germany, Schinkel’s neoclassical/neo-Gothic designs include theaters, memorials and churches, their monumental simplicity often credited with showing the way toward modernism. He also designed the Altes Museum, the antiquities gallery that sits above the new metro station, and provided obvious inspiration for the architects of later grand buildings scattered across Museum Island, a small, pointed peninsula in the River Spree that contains the lion’s share of Berlin’s art and artifact collections.

For fans of mass transit design, Berlin’s U-Bahn system, which opened in 1902 and has been much expanded since, boasts an interesting mix of architectural styles. Many of the stations are extremely plain, but the network is scattered with eccentric gems, including neo-baroque vaults, pop art curves and 1980s psychedelia on the platform. At first glance, Dudler’s vision for the Museum Island station appears to veer more in the minimalist, austere direction: The main concourse is a moody, mausoleum-like colonnade of textured grey columns.

Farther inside, the station takes a more flamboyant turn. The vaults above the train tracks are painted in a dazzling midnight blue, spangled with tiny silver lights to resemble the night sky. These echo closely the spectacular backdrops Schinkel created for an 1816 production of Mozart’s Magic Flute — specifically the moment Mozart’s Queen of the Night returns to stage to sing her famous improbably high-pitched aria.

Judging by pre-opening photographs supplied by the architects, the effect is dramatic, if a little gloomy. That imposing sobriety is a quality shared by the Museum Island itself, making the station beneath it a suitable anteroom to the complex.

Beyond its aesthetic appeal, the new station’s opening will finally iron out a strange, illogical kink in the Berlin subway that’s existed since the city’s 1990 reunification. In 1995, the city began to extend East Berlin’s 1930s-built Line U5, on which Museumsinsel is located, out into the west to connect to the city’s government district and new main station. But construction stopped abruptly in 2002 as the city hit a financial crisis.

In order to avoid being forced to pay back the central government, Berlin opened the part of the line that was ready — a not-especially popular single-track, three-station stub that didn’t connect up to U5 as planned. During a strange period during the 2000s, alternative uses for the still-unneeded space on this line were found: The station under the German parliament was used to host Germany’s first underground go-kart race, to film scenes from the horror movie Resident Evil and to stage an opera about Angela Merkel (albeit not all at once).

Construction resumed in 2010, with three new stations opening along a new section connecting the U5 to the west as planned. Museumsinsel is the final stop to be completed — trains have been running without stopping at the new station since December 2020. Soon, riders will get their first opportunity to stargaze in person.