Description

The history of the museum as a building type begins in the Renaissance.[1] The courtyard of statues in the belvedere of the Vatican, which was designed in 1508 by the most important architect of the time, Donato Bramante, for Pope Julius II, is considered to be the first architectural work created especially for exhibiting works of art. The most prominent classical sculptures still stand in the niches developed out of the corners of this courtyard, which, significantly, was called the Atrio del Piacere by contemporaries (fig. 1), although it was later altered.[2] Subsequently, similar courtyards of statues were built in various Roman palaces and villas, and their ground plans, which have been square for the most part since the museum projects of the French Revolution, have advanced to become one of the fundamental components of the museum.

Gallery and Central Hall

It was in the sixteenth century too that a particular type of room – the gallery – was already coming into being, one that initially developed out of the context as a whole of the castle or palace in France and Italy[3] – and which in the final analysis was rooted in classical times. It was an extended interior room mostly lighted by windows placed along the long sides and suitable both for the emplacement of sculptures and hanging paintings. A lavish decorative program, exemplarily embodied in the gallery of the French King François I erected in Fontainebleau in 1533-40, served both representation and recreation, which is fitting for the works of art shown there. A two-storey gallery commissioned by Vespasiano Gonzaga in Sabbioneta built in 1583-84,[4] forms an open corridor with arcades on both sides on the ground floor. The upper storey designed with niches for busts and painted walls served for exhibiting antique sculptures just as did the similarly designed Galleria della Mostra in the Palazzo Ducale of Mantua, commissioned somewhat later by Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga (fig. 2). However, the most ambitious example is the Antiquarium of the Munich Residenz, founded under Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria,[5] a combination of gallery and treasure chamber, above which the ducal library was housed on the upper floor. This most outstanding secular Renaissance room of the sixteenth century north of the Alps was executed between the years 1568 and 1571 by Wilhelm Egkl and shortly afterward converted into a banquet hall by Friedrich Sustris. The 66-meter-long room does not have a flat ceiling like the other galleries mentioned above, but instead is roofed over by a relatively low, broad barrel vault, into which seventeen groins are cut into each of the two long sides. It is lit by windows placed high up in the walls in such a way that the three-dimensional qualities of the sculptures exhibited there are shown off to advantage in a specific way (fig. 3).

As an almost indispensable constituent of palace building, galleries are found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both in the city palaces of Rome and, with very varied furnishings, in the different German seats of princely power. A particularly magnificent gallery that served both for the exhibition of sculptures and the presentation of paintings, and whose ceiling frescoes glorified the owner is the Galleria in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, designed in 1675-78 by Antonio del Grande and Girolamo Fontana (fig. 4). In 1733, in one wing of the Munich Residenz, François Cuvilliés the Elder erected a picture gallery with seven axes (the Grüne Galerie), which – evidently following the design of the gallery of mirrors in the Palace of Versailles – only had window openings on one of the long sides, and across from it, alternating room-high mirrors and doors. Finally, in England, we often find galleries combined with a central room – an architectural motif that is much favoured in museum buildings in recent times and whose origins go back to long before the beginnings of real museum architecture.

After 1581, Bernardo Buontalenti adapted the upper storey of the Uffizi in Florence – initially designed in 1560 by Giorgio Vasari as offices – to house the Medici art collection. However, for the main works of the collection, he was commissioned by the Grand Duke Francesco I to create the famous Tribuna in the east wing, an octagonal room roofed over by a cupola and conceived as an allegory of the universe with its four elements (fig. 5).[6] In addition to the universal ambition of this spatial creation, brought to expression by the decoration as well as by the statues exhibited there in such a manner as to emphasize their significance, it was certainly also the lighting by means of a central skylight, favourable from a museum technology perspective, which made the Tribuna of the Uffizi a milestone in the history of museum architecture. Sebastiano Serlio had already pointed out the quality of the incidence of light from above in the third book of his treatise on architecture published for the first time in 1540, and had therein praised the classical Pantheon in Rome – whose original purpose was for displaying statues of the gods – for the way it directed light and also for its spatial design as an exemplary collection room.[7] Thus it is not by chance that Peter Paul Rubens had a multi-storey rotunda lit only from above built for his art collection in his city palace in Antwerp; contemporaries compared it with the Pantheon.[8] A century later the motif, inspired by the Pantheon, of a dome-vaulted room accessed by a portico was found in the program for a generously proportioned, four-wing museum in Dresden, in which both the Tribuna of the Uffizi and Rubens’ antique room were cited as models.[9] Finally, since the second half of the eighteenth century domed rotundas – as a rule combined in one way or another with a gallery – belong to the fixed repertoire of museum buildings. A typical example of this motif especially adequate to English classicism is the gallery erected by Robert Adam for the sculpture collection of a Yorkshire nobleman around 1767 as the showpiece of his house Newby Hall: two rectangular rooms with low ceilings and windows only on one side, combined with a rotunda lighted from above in between them (fig. 6).[10] More prominent and thus also more influential than the English private museums, which came into being mostly as the result of the Grand Tour to Italy that nobles were expected to undertake to round out their education[11] was the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican, built around 1773-80 following Bramante’s octagonal courtyard mentioned at the beginning, and named after the Popes Clement XIV and Pius VI.[12] The real significance of this architectural monument, designed by Michelangelo Simonetti, Gaetano Marini and Guiseppe Camporesi, lies in the number of magnificent individual rooms, whose pivotal point is the Sala Rotunda (fig. 7), which consciously reminds one of the Pantheon, the only classical space in Rome that was conserved in its entirety.

Museums as Public Buildings

As if summarizing the architectural motifs described until now, the numerous museum designs of the revolutionary epoch in France almost always provide for a rotunda at the centre of a generously proportioned four-wing arrangement, its square ground plan usually divided into four courtyards by four inner wings – like the outer wings, developed as galleries – in the form of a Greek cross. This is shown in an exemplary fashion by the museum design of Jacques-Nicolas-Louis Durand, considered by his contemporaries as a textbook example (fig. 8).[13] Between 1778 and 1814, the Parisian Académie d’Architecture, a centre of Neoclassicism along with Rome and England, several times offered the renowned Grand Prix de Rome for the design of a museum. It is true that these designs, which released the museum from the old architectural obligations and made it into an autonomous building, were not executed, but some were published. In this way, they exerted a significant influence on the subsequent development of museum architecture. The 1783 museum design by Etienne-Louis Boullée (figs. 9) is particularly spectacular:[14] it is a square building accentuated by four victory columns, with four cloverleaf-like extended colonnades and Greek cross included on the ground plan. Surrounded by columns, an enormous round central room at the elevated intersection of the arms of the cross, themselves developed as stairways roofed over with huge barrel vaults, takes the form of an entirely bare hemisphere – outwardly not apparent – with a round central opening. Although the gigantic dimensions of this ideal design are not calculated with a view to being executed, the intention of this museum project – which was called the “Temple of Glory,” seeking to be both the shrine of the muses and a memorial to great men at one and the same time and thereby, in the end, a symbolic monument for the universality of the spirit of man – nonetheless went far beyond the intention of a largely royal art collection and lent the task of building a museum a status that was reflected, at least to some extent, by the first museum buildings of the nineteenth century and is given more weight than ever in the museum architecture of our time.

Only a few years previously, between 1769 and 1777, Simon Louis Du Ry had erected a strictly symmetrical, two-storey three-wing building in Kassel. The client who commissioned it, Friedrich II, the Landgrave of Hessen, called it the “Museum Fridericianum,” according to the inscription on the gable of the six-columned portico that distinguishes the nineteen-axed main façade structured by colossal Ionic pillars (fig. 10).[15] Uncoupled from the castle complex, the building, whose architectural form combines baroque castle tradition and early neoclassicism, was from the beginning planned exclusively as a publicly accessible (!) link between library and museum and thus can be regarded as Europe’s first autonomous museum building. It is not without reason that the classical-style portico – an architectural symbol of dignity which in this case was certainly linked to the educational ideal of the Enlightenment – was afterwards to be found on numerous nineteenth century museum buildings.

It was not until a generation later, in 1811-14, that another museum building, the Dulwich Picture Gallery designed by Sir John Soane, was erected on the outskirts of London. Although it is unconventionally attached to the mausoleum for the client, the building, originally consisting of a rhythmic sequence of five main rooms alternately square and rectangular and flanked by cabinets can claim to be the first picture gallery erected as an independent building.[16] What is remarkable about this building is not only the unpretentious exterior, but above all the skylight construction, which is still considered exemplary (fig. 11).

The task of building a museum was definitively established as a special category in architecture by the great museums erected at a significant cost in materials and planning in Berlin, Munich and London after the Napoleonic wars. For the Glyptothek in Munich, the building of which was initiated by the Bavarian crown prince who later became King Ludwig I for the exhibition of his important collection of antiques,[17] the architects Karl von Fischer, Karl Freiherr Haller von Hallerstein and Leo von Klenze delivered a series of designs. In different ways these processed the impulses of the French ideal designs, implementing the motifs of the rotunda and the portico. Klenze, who in the end was awarded the brief for the building, which was executed between 1816 and 1830, developed the Glyptothek from inside out – in contrast to his competitors – by coordinating the number, form, decoration, and lighting of the rooms with the objects of the collection, which were arranged chronologically for the first time. Combined with the banquet halls and vestibules that the client demanded, a four-winged building resulted; it had a square interior courtyard (fig. 12) and thus provided the opportunity for a circular tour leading through differently shaped and furnished rooms, during which “the observer clearly sees the course of art, its rise and fall” to use the words of the architect. Both the frescoes by Peter von Cornelius, now destroyed, and the ornaments and sculptural reliefs in the individual rooms related directly to the art works exhibited therein. The main façade, an eight-columned ionic portico between lower wings, was designed in the ‘Greek style’ analogous to the content of the collection in accordance with the explicit desire of the client, to whom Klenze had also presented variations in the ‘Roman style’ as well as in the ‘style of the Renaissance.’ The fact that the empty aedicula niches in the windowless walls are more reminiscent of the Renaissance than of models from classical times shows that for Klenze, it was definitely a matter of creating a new type of building.

The architectural features borrowed from the Italian architecture of the sixteenth century that Klenze chose for the building of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich were to refer programmatically to the painting of the Renaissance, esteemed as the high point of art historical development and represented in particular by Raphael’s paintings.[18] In 1822, while the building work on the Glyptothek was still going on, Klenze, commissioned to design a building for the Wittelsbach collection of paintings, planned a long building for the optimal arrangement and lighting of the collection; on the upper storey there was a series of seven rooms of different sizes lit by skylights. On the north side of them, there were twenty-five cabinets laterally lit by northern light, interconnected with each other and connected to the larger rooms at short intervals. Their counterpart on the south side was a gallery that enabled all of the main rooms to be accessed directly. This was destroyed during the Second World War and replaced by Hans Döllgast’s grand stairway. The short lateral wings contained the stairwell and some special rooms, the ground floor, storerooms, and offices (fig. 13). With this arrangement, Klenze pointed the way to the type of the modern picture gallery and, at the same time, turned away from the French museum designs canonized particularly by Durand, whose influence was still clearly perceptible not only in Klenze’s design for the Glyptothek, but also in the design for the Altes Museum in Berlin that Karl Friedrich Schinkel was drafting at that time.

By the age of nineteen, and without having been commissioned, Schinkel had already delivered the design of a museum building with a portico and two domed rooms set in an idealized classical landscape.[19] With the Altes Museum in the Berlin Lustgarten, erected in 1823-30, he created a building on a par with the palace and the cathedral, the two most important building projects of the preceding century – that was supposed to not only house the works of art, but also – as a building dedicated to art in accordance with the programmatic motto “First give pleasure, then edify” – embody the idea of beauty and enable art to carry out its educational mission.[20] A show side developed as a colossal colonnade over a raised ground floor pierced by a straight-flight stairway elevated the building – destined both for the presentation of sculptures and a collection of paintings – above the level of everyday architecture. Although otherwise appearing as a solid, two-storey block, it also emphasized its public character by adhering to the tradition of using the roofed-over columned hall of classical times. The two storeys each contain laterally lit exhibition rooms, those in the lower storey supported by two rows of columns. These exhibition rooms form four wings surrounding a rectangle; the latter is divided into two small courtyards by a cubic central building extending above eaves height and surrounding a central rotunda. In the stairwell, which provides the central access to the museum and which is transversely placed in the row of exhibition rooms between the columned hall and the rotunda, the one-storey representation area and the two-storey usable area interpenetrate in a very artistic fashion (fig. 14). In spite of certain difficulties of use caused especially by the lack of lighting from above in the picture gallery, Schinkel’s Altes Museum is considered to be the building that definitively ennobled the task of museum-building because of its clear and memorable architecture that linked the functional with the sublime and permanently established the domed rotunda (fig. 14) as a motif of museum architecture.

These early royal museum buildings in Berlin and Munich, which could be described as prototypes of the ‘representative museum,’ exerted an extraordinarily great influence on the numerous museum projects of subsequent years both in Germany and abroad, and as they were considered exemplary, the solutions that Klenze and Schinkel arrived at were again and again drawn upon, on the one hand, because of their functional efficiency, and on the other, because of their formal conciseness. Thus the disposition of the rooms in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich was adopted not only for its counterpart, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, built in 1846-52 by August von Voit (destroyed in the Second World War),[21] but also for the picture gallery in Kassel (Heinrich von Dehn-Rothfelser 1871-77) and the Städelsche Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main (Oskar Sommer, 1874-78), among others. Gottfried Semper had first implemented the exhibition room layout originated by Klenze in the Dresdener Gemäldegalerie, built in 1847-55 – wherein he overlaid the cabinets lit laterally from the north with a second row of cabinets lit from above and not apparent from the exterior[22] – before that layout was eventually chosen for the upper storey of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (1872-89), which Semper had designed together with Carl von Hasenauer for the presentation of the Hapsburgs’ picture collection.[23] However, unlike the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, both the enormous building in Vienna (fig. 15) – which, together with the Natural History Museum facing it, was to become part of an imposing imperial forum – and the one in Dresden acquired their fundamental accentuation through a central projection, crowned by a cupola; it contained not only an octagonal showpiece room (fig. 16) reminiscent of the Tribuna of the Uffizi, but also the stairway, which in Vienna in particular (fig. 17) very clearly upholds the traditional ceremonial function of such stairways in baroque castles and palaces. The effort that went into designing this neo-baroque architecture was justified thus by a contemporary art historian: “That which is to serve as the frame for the highest art must itself be a work of art of the first water.”[24]

While in the two (imperial) museums in Vienna – both symmetrically-grouped blocks around two inner courtyards – the spatial dispositions that were developed in the museum buildings of the early nineteenth century, combined with the pathos of the baroque architecture of power, were elevated to the palace-like museum type, a much simpler museum variation had long since been developed.[25] Although it is also symmetrically arranged, it consists for the most part only of a two-storey wing that is, however, accentuated by a central projection in which a stairway instead of a central cupola room serves for representative purposes; it is often decorated with frescoes that could effectively convey content. The Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, built in 1837-46 by Heinrich Hübsch, which was only expanded into a four-winged construction decades later,[26] and the Kunsthalle in Bremen erected by Lüder Rutenberg in 1844-49 [27] are examples of this. Both museums – one commissioned by a duke, the other by a citizens’ art association – have recourse to a formal language oriented on the Italian Renaissance that had established itself in the historicist canon as the preferred style for museum buildings. The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne (fig. 18) represents a significant exception to this; integrating the cloisters of the former Minorite Church, it was executed as a three-wing building in Gothic forms by Friedrich August Stüler after preliminary designs by Josef Felten and Julius Raschdorff.[28] One of the busiest museum architects of the nineteenth century, Stüler designed among others the Neues Museum in Berlin (1840-55)[29] and the National Museum in Stockholm (1850-66)[30] in the style of the Renaissance; in Cologne, motivated by the spectacular completion of the cathedral, he bowed to the local preference for Gothic detail forms without giving up his tried and tested neoclassicist basic conception for museum buildings.

Architecture and Exhibit: Stylistic Coincidence versus Neutrality

The preference for Gothic details in the building of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (destroyed in the Second World War) was, however, also motivated by the specific character of the art collection exhibited there, its core being late mediaeval panel paintings. This attempt to create a certain stylistic coincidence between the museum building and the objects exhibited therein (an attempt already undertaken in the first great museum buildings of the nineteenth century), was eventually concretized to such an extent that the Handbuch der Architektur published in 1906 considered it a self-evident requirement that for the objects to be exhibited “rooms be created and architecturally developed to correspond to their respective distinguishing characters … [to] transport the observer into a [corresponding] cultural and historical milieu and thus make a lasting impression.”[31] An excellent example of this is the Bavarian National Museum built in 1894-1900 by Gabriel Seidl,[32] in which architecture, room furnishings and collections are united into a Gesamtkunstwerk understood as a complete compendium of Bavarian architectural tradition. In so doing, Seidl oriented himself on the Musée de Cluny established in Paris in 1844 in the former Cluniac monastery, on the Germanisches Nationalmuseum established a little later in the former Carthusian monastery in Nuremberg,[33] and not least on the Swiss regional museum in Zurich executed in 1892-98 after plans by Gustav Gull (fig. 19), as well as on the Historical Museum in Bern executed at the same time by Eduard von Rodt but designed by Lambert and Stahl, whose architecture imitated a picturesque sixteenth century Swiss fortress. An irregularly grouped ground plan adapted to a wide range of exhibition requirements and which in principle can be extended as necessary is common to these last named museums – thus significantly distinguishing them from all the symmetrically arranged architectures discussed until now. With this architecture, which contemporaries called an “affiliation system,”[34] a museum type had come into being toward the end of the nineteenth century that was fundamentally different from the clear structures of the early museum buildings. While the closely linked design relation between architecture and exhibition material soon proved to be too rigid and inflexible – it often contained prescribed visitor routes, it had developed out of a historical-materialist way of observing art, and it aimed at a reconstruction of material living conditions as the explanation for cultural phenomena of the past – the fundamental turning away from the severely formal museum type of the early nineteenth century opened up new design possibilities. Subsequently, not only did these become the expression of a new self-image of the museum, but they also represented a new challenge to architecture in view of the fact that the more and more congested urban situation increasingly required specific consideration of the surroundings in order to integrate the museum into its urban context without giving up its specific character. Although in the end this has resulted in an overabundance of formal solutions, a surprising consistency in the use of classical motifs of sovereignty can also be discerned. In particular, in the English-speaking world strongly marked by Neo-Palladianism (where in 1823 Sir Robert Smirke had already had the motif of the long colonnade in mind for the British Museum in London (not executed until 1840-47) (fig. 20)[35] independently of Schinkel’s Altes Museum and in a less radical form), classical motifs were used until well into the twentieth century to characterize the museum as a shrine to humanism, as it were. Thus there is a portico and a central rotunda not only in the National Gallery in London (William Wilkins, 1832-38),[36] but also, more than a century later, there is one at the National Gallery in Washington (John Russell Pope, 1937-41).[37] Even an architect like Theodor Fischer, who always developed his buildings out of their respective functional programs and the urban conditions, and who is considered to be one of those who overcame historicism in Germany, did not renounce these formulae for dignity in his museum designs. Not only does he make a Roman portico and a domed octagon whose interior quotes Aachen’s Palatial Chapel into the pivotal point of his great museum complex in Wiesbaden built in 1912-15 (fig. 21),[38] but he also creates an illustrative link between these two elements and the Roman and mediaeval art works exhibited there.

By that time the reconstruction of a stylistically identical milieu enshrined in the Handbuch der Architektur of 1906[39] had long since been declared obsolete by the avant-garde of museum experts of the time, who favoured the idea that the art museum should convey a neutral studio mood.[40] In combination with the fact that the gradual conversion of the museum into a mass medium with an educational mission had also had the effect of founding innumerable museums of historical and contemporary artefacts with correspondingly varied functional requirements, the popularisation and pedagogy propagated by the museum reformers eventually led to a turning away from the representative type of museum. The fact that this type was branded as feudalistic, above all in those countries that had been defeated in the First World War, was a further reason for the disappearance of a fixed museum building type in the period between the wars. Historically, it is a logical consequence that the totalitarian systems of the 1930s again made use of that apparatus of forms in their museum buildings,[41] exaggerating them to gigantic proportions, as we see in the Haus der Kunst in Munich,[42] and more skilfully executed in the Roman museum buildings of that time.[43]

As the counterpart to this, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the meantime enlarged several times, was opened in 1939 in the unpretentious International Style (fig. 22).[44] Its exhibition rooms were developed out of the residential character of the old building by the architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone. A few years previously, George Howe and William Lescaze had already presented a design for this museum whose volumes stacked up one on top of the other more closely resembled a series of maisonettes than a classical museum.[45] The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (built in 1929-35) is entirely comparable, not in the result, but in its intention to adapt to the urban residential building structure.[46] Hendrik Petrus Berlage had already delivered a neatly interlocked design that included more than one hundred rooms for this museum’s varied art and art history collections. The execution, in the end significantly reduced, nonetheless conserved the basic idea of staging the museum not as a monumental representative building but instead as a many-jointed ensemble, its detailing oriented on bourgeois residential building motifs (fig. 23). The trend thus adopted in museum building, in which the exhibition objects and the art works in particular were tied into the bourgeois context and in so doing, divested of their pathos, found its continuation in the Kröller-Müller-Museum, which – significantly – is also in the Netherlands. After Peter Behrens, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Berlage had already commenced the planning to accommodate the Rotterdam industrialist family Kröller-Müller’s art collection in 1911, what came into being in the end under changed conditions in 1937-38 was a one-storey museum building designed by Henry van de Velde only as a provisory solution, with a cross-shaped atrium in the centre, approached from two sides by a corridor flanked by cabinets (fig. 24).[47] Small and low-ceilinged by comparison, the rooms from the first stage of construction were lit to a large extent by skylights in order to be able to dispense with side windows and thereby achieve maximum hanging space. This was a solution dictated primarily by a lack of funds; however, it did represent the continuation of an earlier, much more opulent design by van de Velde, in that it conceived the museum as a self-contained volume and thereby endowed it with the character of a treasure house.[48] While this ‘closed’ quality led in the end to the so-called ‘dark museums’ of the seventies, the principle of the pavilion-like, extensible museum adapted to the landscape was several times taken up, above all in the first decades after the Second World War.[49] The most well known and probably also the most beautiful example of this is the Louisiana Museum, situated on the Öresund near Humlebæk, in the vicinity of Copenhagen. It was begun in 1956 and its architects, Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert, extended it again and again over a period of more than four decades. The rhythmically grouped pavilions of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem built between 1959 and 1965 after the plans by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad and since then, also extended many times (fig. 25),[50] are also spaciously distributed over a hill.

Between Functional Requirements and Architectural Representation

Whereas the Israel Museum seen from a distance reminds one of the silhouette of a Near Eastern village, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne is comparable to the front of a series of bourgeois row houses because of its gables lined up one next to the other, and thereby the museum is situated quite clearly in the same tradition as the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. Designed by Rudolf Schwarz as a simple brick building, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, opened in 1957, was the first German museum building of the post-war years.[51] First reactions to the building were very varied, ranging from assessments such as “factory-like sobriety” to “pseudo-sacred dream world.” These bear witness to the problem – still a virulent one – of determining where the task of building a museum should be situated in relation to fulfilment of function and architectural representation. In the extension to the Kestner Museum in Hanover, this ambivalence – associated in particular with the field of tension between tradition and the modern age – led to a surprisingly pragmatic solution.[52] Although almost undamaged, the old building erected by Wilhelm Manchot in 1869 in the conventional monumental neo-Classicist style did not provide sufficient space for the museum’s collection of arts and crafts. Following a plan by Werner Dierschke (1958-61), it was enveloped in a honeycomb skin that left such a large space between it and the façades of the front and the back of the building that the exhibition area was more than doubled (fig. 26). The contrast thus produced (so typical of the treatment of historical structural fabric in the fifties) between the old monumental façade – that could now be experienced only partially, having itself become an exhibition object – and the new latticed glass façade reminiscent of a jewellery box was able to thematize the subject ‘museum’ only in the interior. The exterior, so similar in appearance to a German department store that it could be mistaken for one (fig. 26) hardly gives any indication of the purpose of this building.

Combining traditional and new elements, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, united with the Ruhrland­museum into a museum centre in the eighties, was newly built in 1956-60.[53] The organization of the original building around two inner courtyards (fig. 27) is traditional; what is new is not only the formal language oriented on the modernity of the twenties, but also the division of the entire volume into functional units: an ‘entrance bridge’ made of glass links the low exhibition part laid out around the double atrium with the double-storey service wing – a solution that has proved to be very practical and a little later, was used in a similar way not only in the Römisch-Germanisches Museum in Cologne,[54] but also, for example, in the Gotoh Art Museum in Tokyo.[55] A generation later, in the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the exhibition and administrative buildings are finally entirely separated from each other. Within the exhibition area too, the separation of functional units, gradually coming into play since the fifties, led to a distinction being made between permanent, more or less completed collections and temporary exhibitions. The Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum in Duisburg, built in 1959-64, is considered to be a classic example of the combination of a static and a dynamic museum area. Manfred Lehmbruck, who had already grouped disparate museum areas and other cultural facilities such as a pavilion around a central entrance hall in the Reuchlinhaus in Pforzheim (fig. 28),[56] used a glazed entrance wing here to link the static museum part dedicated to his father’s sculptural works and formed of concrete slabs, to a glazed hall, conceived as a large display case for temporary exhibitions and which allowed all manner of spatial development with the aid of standardized installation assembly elements. By transferring the supporting structural elements to the exterior, it allowed all types of light incidence. Affonso Eduardo Reidy had already effected a comparable construction in the gallery wing of his museum for modern art in Rio de Janeiro, completed in 1955 (fig. 29).[57]

The concept of the ‘living museum,’ the prerequisite for which is a variable spatial design, had been developed in the early post-war years by the Hanover museum director Alexander Dorner, who later became a university lecturer in the United States. He does not consider the museum a “temple of eternal values” but as a “place in which the evolutionary growth of our cultural strengths” should become apparent.[58] It was not least the recognition that the criteria for evaluating preservation and exhibition value are subject to continuous change that led to a rejection of mono-functional buildings and to the demand, voiced by Walter Gropius among others, for the greatest possible flexibility in the interior of the museum through the avoidance of a rigid arrangement of walls.[59] The first spatial constructions that a century previously had already essentially fulfilled these conditions were the neutral and flexible buildings of iron and glass. The most spectacular of these, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, erected within the space of nine months (fig. 30), achieved wide renown through World Exposition in London in 1851[60] and within a short time, had numerous successors.[61] The fact that the glass palace erected in Munich in 1853-54 for an industry and trade exhibition[62] was designed by August von Voit is interesting, for he is the architect who had built the Neue Pinakothek shortly before. Nonetheless, at first a strict distinction was made between museum buildings and the buildings constructed with iron. These latter were by their very nature anti-museums; they “were presentation buildings, without being at the same time representation buildings.”[63] Although this type of exhibition architecture was used in isolated cases for American museums in the succeeding decades, it was not until more than a century had passed that it came into use in museum buildings, for example, in Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, designed in 1974 (fig. 31)[64]or in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, built in 1980 by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo.[65] Although the Neue Nationalgaleriein Berlin is usually interpreted as a temple metaphor because of its formal perfection, as the design for a large column-free space that Mies van der Rohe had initially intended to be an administrative building,[66] it is situated in the tradition of the glass palaces of the nineteenth century. The Centre Pompidou in Paris, built between 1972 and 1977, is the building that must be considered their real successor; its architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, planned it as a “flexible container and dynamic communication machine” and thus as a counterweight to the design of the museum as a sacred place. It seems paradoxical that the interior space of the Centre Pompidou, intended to be entirely open, was in the end subdivided into small spaces by other architects and thereby lost much of its dynamism and flexibility, while the undivided spatial container of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, built a decade previously by Mies van der Rohe, functions only to a limited extent as a flexible exhibition space, although as an architectural monument, it carries on directly where Schinkel’s Altes Museum left off. From this discrepancy, which comes to light particularly clearly in the disputes over the building of the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, it becomes clear that since the seventies at the latest, there has not been any unilinear evolution in museum building. The reasons for this are complex and contradictory.[67] Although the increasing density and networking of information and the enormous intensification of cultural and economic interrelations that has enabled American architects to build in Europe, Austrians in France, Italians in the Netherlands, Japanese in Spain, and Germans in America would lead one to expect a similar assimilation in architectural expression, the diversification of the spectrum of museum buildings, the transgression of the boundaries between genres that resulted out of an expanded conception of art, but above all, the widening of the museum’s functional scope, transforming it into an experiential space, a new public space and not least, into an identity-generating factor for a location have, in actual fact, led to great variety in architectural design, which it is hardly possible to systematize.[68]

The task of building museums has certainly been considered particularly attractive in the last decades not only because of the oft-cited fact that “the planning of museums represents something like the last free space for the exercise of designing with artistic ambitions, which is because it is one of the few tasks for which no special guidelines, building codes or standardized expectations have been developed until now, luckily”[69] – which, at best, only partially still holds true – but instead and above all, probably because hardly any other building task is more suitable for representing the self-image of architecture oscillating between fiction and function. In this regard, the possibilities of architectural design range from extreme dynamic force and formal opulence to extreme reduction. As an incunabulum of the belief that architecture does not have to serve art, but instead to challenge it,[70] the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (fig. 32), on which Frank Lloyd Wright worked since 1943 and whose opening in 1959 he did not live to enjoy, very soon found its established place in the history of architecture.[71] Although the large sculptural form of the rising, funnel-shaped spiral, sharply criticized for its very limited functionality, but undisputed as an architectural work of art, did not have any direct successors, it has established the importance of the museum as an architectural work of art so successfully that the museum building in Bilbao, commissioned half a century later by the Guggenheim Foundation was obliged to measure itself against the inimitable conciseness of Wright’s building and to counter it with a contemporary equivalent.

The task of building a museum finally became the focus of public interest at the beginning of the eighties with Hans Hollein’s Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach (fig. 33), which won several rewards. It united the traits of heterogeneous museum types into an effectively staged architectural landscape that met a variety of functional requirements, without ever giving up its artistic claims. The museum in Mönchengladbach is at the beginning of a continuing wave of new museum buildings whose stylistic labelling, which ranges from the Postmodernism of the eighties[72] via Deconstruction (fig. 34) to the Minimalism of the nineties (fig. 35), says little, of course, about the respectively specific characteristics or typological categorization of these buildings.[73] Despite their very divergent formal language, what almost all these buildings have in common is their architectural ambition:[74] while many of the museums apostrophized as Postmodern replace the awe-inspiring gesture of the nineteenth century by generating a curious, often ironically staged attitude of expectation, the museums reduced to the simplest volumes, whose prototype is considered to be the small Goetz collection in Munich (Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, 1989-92)[75] are determined by an aesthetic as rigorous as it is refined. The Kunsthaus Bregenz, for example, is hardly any more neutral in relation to the works of art than the bulky architecture of the extension pavilion of the Groninger Museum[76] whose architects are proud that no one has yet succeeded in designing a good exhibition in it.[77]

Although the functional requirements of visitor circulation, lighting, etc. in cultural history museums or museums of technology are basically the same as those in art museums, the opportunities and problems of contemporary museum architecture are particularly evident there, because the confrontation with the works of fine art directly challenges architecture – either to create an envelope whose purpose is to serve or to produce the self-projection of an artistic genre on a par with the works of art. Therefore, in this account we shall deal primarily with art museums, and for these it is true that the variable – and at the same time, critical – point is the view of art, which for some is something exciting, occasionally moving or even amusing, but always something consumable, while for others it is a way to understanding. For architecture, particularly because it understands itself to be art, the great challenge is still to design museums “that are neither dormitories nor entertainment centres, but instead laboratories for sensory appreciation and unrelenting rational, critical reflection.”

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Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, “The Architecture of Art”, in: Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, New York, 1998, 229-231.

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.