Description

This archaic-looking building, whose architect wants it to be understood not as a traditional museum building but rather as an “architectural essay on art,” is situated in a narrow valley in the Alps, on the St Gotthard Pass, on the outskirts of Giornico in Ticino. Erected exclusively for the sculptures and reliefs of Hans Josephson (born 1920), not only does the building try to give an architectural response to the expressive sculptures and to bring them to the greatest possible degree of density and concentration, but also it gives the appearance of being itself a sculpture in the mountain landscape.

The long building, 42 metres in length, consists of three consecutive volumes of the same width, but different heights. Along the top of each of them are set prisms, noticeably slightly off in their alignment with the axis. Light from above enters through them illuminating the otherwise entirely windowless building of cast concrete, whose unplastered, plinthless walls are marked by the pattern of formwork boarding and whose isolated ashlars are recognizably set apart from each other by the structure of the horizontal interstices precisely defined by the architect.

One accesses the interior from the narrow side facing away from the village. Visitors are thus forced to go around the building, experiencing it in its physicality and its attitude to the landscape. The three rooms lying one behind the other are linked in enfilade but not quite in line with the axis; their mutual autonomy is emphasized by strikingly high door thresholds. The very different effect of these rooms arises exclusively out of the subtly pondered differentiation of their proportions owing nothing to any mechanical grid, and the resultant variety in the incidence of light. While the entrance room is only a little higher than it is wide and a little longer than it is high, and therefore more or less non-directional, the second room, which, like the third one, is two and a half times as long as the first, because of its significantly reduced height unfolds an effect of depth that is finally neutralized in the last and highest room. Four cabinets on the sides, which from the outside appear to be supplementary rectangular parallelepipeds, horizontally placed, lend this room a more complex character, without cancelling out the impressive frugality of this architecture.

Faces. Journal d’architectures 26/1992, pp. 8-14 (Martin Steinmann/Beat Wismer) • Werk, Bauen und Wohnen 12/1992, pp. 30-35 • Domus 753/1993, pp. 4-5 (Luca Gazzaniga) • Techniques et Architecture 408/1993, pp. 70-73 • Stiftung La Congiunta. Peter Märkli – Haus für Reliefs und Halbfiguren des Bildhauers Hans Josephson, ed. Kunsthaus Bregenz. Werkdokumente, Stuttgart, 1994 • La Congiunta. Haus für Reliefs und Halbfiguren von Hans Josephson, ed. Fondazione La Congiunta, Zurich, 1996 • Baumeister 8/1996, pp. 35-39 (Marcel Meili) • Anna Meseure/Martin Tschanz/Wilfried Wang (eds.), Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert. Schweiz, Munich/London/New York, Frankfurt an Main, 1998, pp. 282-283 (Angeli Sachs) • Wilfried Wang (ed.), World Architecture 1900-2000: A Critical Mosaic, vol. 3, Vienna/New York, 2000, pp. 242-243

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