Description

Inside and Outside

The function of the museum as a place in which the special is conserved and at the same time exhibited has certain consequences, firstly for the design of the entrance area. In the representative museums of the nineteenth century, more or less distinctive formulae of dignity from architectural history’s canon distinguish the entrance, which almost always lies in the building axis, and in that way indicates that the interior contains something extraordinary (fig. 1). The stairway leading up to the entrance, usually above street level, brings the distinguishing aspect immediately into view. In contrast to this, in today’s museums that strive more to be places of learning or fairs than to be temples of the muses, architects go to much trouble to reduce the fear of the unknown and even prevent it from arising in the first place. The first new museum building in post-war Germany, the former Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, although it took up the basic structure of the previous nineteenth century building (fig. 2), did without its projecting centre, and shifted the ground-level entrance noticeably away from the middle, making it recognizable only by means of a discreet bronze roof (which was not originally planned). Since then only seldom has an attempt been made to stage an entrance situation that allows the entrance into the museum to become a ceremonious act. Even in the entrance of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, whose design is not without pathos, the suction effect overcomes the fear of the unknown and the gloomy ceremoniousness created by the entrance hall is mitigated by the use of room-height glazing creating transparency. The entrance is usually designed in a consciously unpretentious manner, as it is in the Fondation Beyeler in Basel for example, and in the Kunsthaus Bregenz and in the Neues Museum in Nuremberg. From time to time it is displaced with ironic casualness as it is in the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, reduced to a meagre hatch as it is in the Museum La Gongiunta in Giornico, or almost hidden, as in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. In contrast to this, the entrance to the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach is in an affected Tempietto very obviously placed (fig. 3), from which the way leads down into the museum, partially hidden in the mountain, so that it becomes a ritual cave, thus reversing the temple metaphor. Although this staging says a great deal about a certain facet of today’s museum concept, it nonetheless remains as much an exception as the building task resolved by Ieoh Ming Pei in the form of a glass pyramid, to create a new central main entrance in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre for the largest museum in the world (fig. 4).[1] What is remarkable about this creation primarily determined by urban planning is not least the fact that due to its weightlessness and transparence, the pyramid, lighted from in­side at night, and under which an enormous hall distributes the public, does not evoke funereal symbolism, but on the contrary, evokes openness and clarity: an indication of an understanding of the museum that was significantly marked by the establishment of the Musée Français two centuries previously at this very spot.

The entrance to the museum, which as the seam between inside and outside in a way represents the architectural interface between the public and the content of the collection, triggers in the visitor a certain attitude of expectation, which is confirmed, modified or corrected by the foyer or the entrance hall. While the visitor to a nineteenth-century museum – almost always two storeys or more – will usually be received by a representative stairway designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk that continues the contents expressed in the architectural forms and sculptural programs of the exterior[2] and provides edification as well as instruction through referential frescoes (fig. 5),[3] the design spectrum for the entrance area in the museums of the late twentieth century includes a multiplicity of possibilities, whose common denominator is most likely to be that there are no more fixed relations between inside and outside. “The unpredictability of the architectural experience has virtually become a program.”[4] Thus the sluice-like entrance and the low reception area behind it in Cologne’s Ludwig Museum present an unexpected contrast to the almost baroque drama of the stairway connected to it, positioned perpendicularly to the entrance (fig. 6) – an effect which, although formally more logical, also characterises the entrance situation of the Het Valkof Museum in Nijmegen while on the other hand, the stairway of the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, which lies along the axis of the building (fig. 7) fulfills with logical consequence that expectation triggered off by the emphasized projecting main entrance. In Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne, the antagonism between the portal and the staircase is cancelled out in the end, because the building-high glazed entrance and its mirrored correspondent, the Wintergarden, appear to be only imaginary boundaries of the enormous diagonal stairway, already visible from outside. In other cases, the stairway is reduced entirely to its function of connecting the different floors, as is the case, for example, in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg or, in reaction to the origin of its space-determining role in the baroque architecture of power, replaced by the ramp, which is considered to be a genuine motif of classical modernism. In addition, it offers the advantage of being suitable for wheelchair access. Examples for this can be found not only in Richard Meier’s museum buildings indebted to this modernism (fig. 7), but also in the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, regarded as the incunabulum of the postmodern. However, portals and entrance halls or stairways in most cases no longer play a significant role as classical key features of the antagonism between interior and exterior. As a further consequence, the entrance is not located in the façade, but inside the envelope, and in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, for example, it is situated at the interface between the public ramp and the slanted floor of the interior opposite, thus leaving the boundaries between exterior and interior blurred. At times, the ambivalence between exterior and interior space serves less for the dismantling of barriers than for the thematization of architectural possibilities per se. The tendency to lead visitors into the museum so that on one hand they do not experience thresholds, and on the other, they are granted an exciting architectural experience can be particularly clearly observed in the entrance scenario of the Museu de Serralves in Porto, meticulously but playfully laid out, so that visitors reach the interior of the building by means of a succession of comparatively long hallways alternately broad and narrow (fig. 9). Finally, in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the situation is completely reversed, in that the escalator by which the building is accessed is shifted to the exterior and thereby determines the appearance of the façade: thus the plaza in front of the museum becomes the real foyer.

Circulation

Inside the museum, the circulation generated by the arrangement and linking of the individual spaces[5] determines the quality of the museum experience to at least as great an extent as the form or character of the individual spaces. In assuming that awareness of one’s location and continuity of movement are some of the elements people are conditioned to expect, and that in addition, however, their rhythmically composed nature either consciously or unconsciously resists all stereotypes and unmodified repetitions of the same elements, one is bringing to mind crucial criteria for the structuring of sequences of spaces in museums.[6] Although on these physiological and psychological aspects are superimposed to a greater or lesser extent a series of additional factors such as operational sequences and urban planning dependencies etc., nonetheless they obviously already played an important part in the first rooms designed for exhibition purposes like the Antiquarium in the Munich Residenz (fig. 10) or the galleries in Sabbioneta and Mantua (fig. 11): the long halls enable and even force the visitor walking along them to observe the immobile objects in a sequence – a process of successive perception which is similar to experiencing a city and which fundamentally differs from the virtuality of a monitor. The inherent laws of consecutive perception are taken into account by all spatial layouts that correspond to the principles of continuity and linearity. Rigid spatial sequences arranged in enfilade (fig. 12) are sufficient to meet the exigencies of this aspect, as are corridor-like rooms joined together (fig. 13), and even – as here it is less a matter of concrete geometric form than one of spatial interrelations – spiral arrangements, the most well-known of which, the Guggenheim Museum in New York,[7] for its part goes back not only to Frank Lloyd Wright’s earlier parking structure design, but above all, to Le Corbusier’s 1931 design for a “museum of unlimited growth”. According to Le Corbusier’s concept, its square spiral, whose archetypical symbolic meaning related to growth and continual return he undoubtedly was aware of, was supposed to be extended continuously as the collection grew.[8]

Open space stands in fundamental opposition to the last-mentioned design – never executed – which drives the principle of linearity to extremes, and which, although guaranteeing continuity of movement and also enabling didactic efficiency in the presentation of collection objects, limits visitors’ freedom significantly, however. Without further adaptation, open space is only in rare cases suitable for the presentation of exhibition objects, and for this reason it can only form the architectural frame for an exhibition facility that is flexible and variable. The sketch of an exhibition staging by the museum architect Manfred Lehmbruck shows how such a staging could be structured, taking into account the physiological and psycholo­gical dependencies of the museum visitors mentioned above (fig. 14).[9] The way the visitor routing un­folds is crucial: although in principle continuous, backward loops and cross-connections are not ruled out.

Most of the new museum buildings assembled in this publication offer the possibility of choosing between several paths, a possibility that was already a given as an idea of civil freedom in Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, in spite of the rigid structure of its ground plan (fig. 15). The range extends from the extension of the main route through a straight sequence of rooms by means of accessory paths that always come back to this main route, to the complexity of the room layouts referred to here as ‘matrix-like,’ which do not allow a dominant direction to come to the fore, but instead leave the visitor several different ways to go that appear equally good. The grid-like connections placed in the corners of the exhibition rooms (fig. 16) are paradigmatic examples of this. In addition to the advantage of offering the greatest possible amount of space for hanging pictures and the suspense of diagonal views each offers three different possibilities for continuing the tour. However, the suspense engendered by the possibility of choosing leads to helplessness, and sooner or later the pleasure of discovery turns into confusion when visitors become disoriented, losing track of where they are. Therefore orientation should be enabled at calculated intervals, by means of periodic retracing of the multifarious routes through to unambiguous sequences of rooms, as in the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, for example, or in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, or by means of obvious orientation points that provide an overview of the spatial interconnections, like those we find in Mönchengladbach, where counterpoised exhibition levels are staggered at half-storey intervals, on one hand opening surprising perspectives, while on the other, also facilitating orientation. Here it becomes clear, too, that linearity or complexity in circulation design does not have to be limited to a single level; instead differences in level can contribute significantly to avoiding monotony. In this way the route in Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, accompanied by several accessory routes, but in principal clearly recognizable purposefully overcomes step by step the difference in level of one floor to the next before it leads back again to the exit level. In Mönchengladbach, richly varied stairway forms characterize not only the appearance of diverse counterpoised and staggered exhibition rooms, but also become the architectural expression of a three-dimensional route – a trend that leads finally to Alessandro Mendini’s stairway sculpture clad with coloured mosaic tiles in the Groninger Museum, which itself becomes an exhibition object.

Spatial Experience and Object Presentation

However, despite the weight of meanings that have devolved upon the architecture of the museum, going beyond this primary function, the real purpose of the museum continues to lie, as it always has done, in the presentation of objects, among which a special status accrues to works of art, because their reception not only conveys knowledge to the observer, but should also engender an aesthetic experience. Out of this results the fundamental question of the connection between space and object, which in turn implies the problem of perception.

The experience of space is one of mankind’s elementary experiences.[10] We experience spatial impressions expansively, with the body, whereby the relation between one’s own body size and the size of the building and its dimensions forms an essential component of this experience. The route that one takes through the architectural space is essential to grasping it. On the other hand, though, we grasp the spatial quality visually by means of geometric abstraction, by dividing the built space in the areas surrounding it that are revealed principally by their outlines.[11]

The object in space, which we initially capture in its total spatial context, achieves a particular value through its placing within this context. When the spatial conditions (size and proportions, lighting, materials, colours, etc.) change, the effect that the object has on the observer changes too. Conversely, different objects are able to transform one and the same space entirely, as is shown by an exhibition room in the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach that was created for a particular work of art: it is hardly able to offer an adequate frame for another one. The contrast between the Musee d’Orsay in Paris – converted with great creative effort from a nineteenth century railway station into a museum for objects from that period (fig. 17)[12] – and a video installation in a low-key, but definitely not neutrally-designed room in the Museu de Serralves in Porto (fig. 18) may demonstrate the sheer unbounded variety of possible relations between space and object.

The person-object-space constellation may occur in accordance with a variety of design principles:[13] as correspondence or harmonious connection, as contrast or conscious antithesis, or as adaptation or association, in which the imaginative aura of the object finds a more or less adequate correspondence in the building. While the latter relation between object and exhibition space corresponds essentially to the milieu reconstruction favoured around 1900, the two remaining possibilities mark in a fairly wide range of variation the appearance of museum rooms today. If one takes picture galleries as an example, the scope of this ranges from supposedly neutral prism-formed white space (fig. 19) to those gallery rooms considered classic, with coloured wall covering, skirting boards, moulding and ceiling vaults (fig. 20), to the deconstructivists’ exploded spatial forms in which hanging wall panels have to be used as aids in order to achieve the optic isolation required by conventional panel painting, which cannot be provided entirely by picture frames alone (fig. 21).

The “withdrawal out of the picture” propagated since the late fifties of the twentieth century – which on one hand sought to lead art, which had arrived at the limit of its exhibitability, out of the museum, but on the other hand made the museum the place where the now stageable art could be shown and thereby into the fulcrum of the avant-garde[14] – demanded from museum spaces, however, qualities that strived to dissolve the classical static relationship between object and observer in favour of one understood to be dynamic. This had already been the intention of the Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer in 1930, in his design for the architectural photo show of the Deutscher Werkbund in Paris, in which he tried to expand the experience of the observer by not limiting himself to the usual perpendicularly arranged wall areas, but activating other spatial areas.[15] Man’s basic orientation to what is perceived as vertical, however, let spatial experiments of this type remain the exception and helped museum designs such as Carlo Scarpa’s, for example, to achieve the widest acceptance. Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio in Verona, whose staging is still considered exemplary even half a century after it was built,[16] shows, for instance, just how much orthogonally arranged areas adapted in colour and dimension to the objects and the space can intensify the effect of exhibition objects[17] without dominating them (fig. 22).

The interrelationship between object and space and above all, the relations between the observer and the object are significantly marked by lighting.

18

Albert Erbe, Belichtung von Gemäldegalerien, Leipzig, 1923; Peter Balla/Christian Bartenbach, “Beleuchtung von Museumsräumen,” in: Werk, Bauen und Wohnen 12/1980, 38-43; Harald Hofmann, “Licht im Museum,” in: Bauwelt 20-21/1985, 804-806; Michael Brawne, The Museum Interior: Temporary and Permanent Display Techniques, 1982, 102 ff.; Hanns Freymuth, “Tageslichttechnische Ent­wurfsunterstützung am Beispiel von Museumsräumen,” in: Bauwelt 32/1989, 1485-1491; Stefan Trenkner, “Licht, Sinn und Wirkung – besonders für die Beleuchtung empfindlicher Objekte in Museen,” in: AIT 7-8/1992, 78-79; John Darragh and James S. Snyder, Museum Design. Planning and Building for Art, New York/Oxford, 1993, 263 ff.

Without going into the technical aspects of the lighting of museum spaces here – that has its own section – let me point out at least the basic differences between natural and artificial light on one hand, and between light from above and lateral lighting on the other hand. Here too, the first museums of the nineteenth century were influential, above all the Dulwich Gallery in London (fig. 23) and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, whose exhibition rooms, with high vault mirroring by means of lanterns set on top of it receive evenly distributed natural scattered light from above that changes only with the change in the time of year and time of day. In contrast to this, the proponents of lateral light, to whom in particular Rudolf Schwarz, the architect of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne belongs, accuse the halls lighted from above of occasioning claustrophic feelings and point out that lateral lighting is more natural, and that in addition, it gives the rooms a direction.

19

A summary of this discussion is to be found in Peter J. Tange, “Museologie und Architektur. ‘Neuer’ Museumsbau in Deutschland,” in: Dortmunder Architekturausstellung 1979: Museumsbauten: Musentempel, Lernorte, Jahrmärkte (= 15th Dortmunder Architekturheft), Dortmund, 1979; cf. Stephan Waetzoldt, “Museumsarchitektur in der Bundesrepublik Deutsch­land nach 1945,” in: Forma et subtilitas. Festschrift für Wolfgang Schöne zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Wilhelm Schlink and Martin Sperlich, Berlin/New York, 1986, 290-299, in particular 295 ff.

Finally, the proponents of artificial light, who initially came primarily from the ranks of sober technologists and mainly from the USA, marshal arguments about the practical advantages of having continuous, evenly distributed light that can be easily regulated, larger areas for hanging pictures (because of the lack of windows), about the unproblematic and easy realizability of multi-storey buildings (with a better economic exploitation of the plot), and about the curatorial benefits (because undesirable incidence of light and changes in temperature can be avoided). The fact that natural and artificial light, lighting from above and from the side and all their variations, from the spotlight to matt reflection light, do not have to be fundamentally mutually exclusive is evidenced by museums such as the oft-mentioned building in Mönchengladbach in which are found almost all the known lighting systems and qualities of light – and harmonize with each other entirely. Museums as different as the Fondation Maeght in St-Paul-de-Vence

20

Josep Lluís Sert, in collaboration with Bellini, Lizzero & Gozzi, 1961-64; Michael Brawne, The Museum Interior: Temporary and Permanent Display Techniques, 1982, 99-102; Jaume Freixa, Josep Ll. Sert. 2nd ed., Zurich, 1984, 138-145.

and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel (fig. 24)

21

Wilfried and Katharina Steib, 1978-80; Hannelore Schubert, Moderner Museumsbau. Stuttgart, 1986, 127-129.

show how much the solution to the problem of lighting can affect the form and character of the exhibition rooms. In any case, the balance between space, object, and observer is crucial, and there can be no fixed rules for achieving it – yet there must be an attempt to convert the museum experience “into a holistic experience that triggers a process of conversion from the receptive to the creative in the conscious – as well as in the subconscious.”

22

Manfred Lehmbruck, “Freiraum Museumsbau,” in: deutsche bauzeitung 8/1980, 13.

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