Description

There is probably no other museum building from the last decades that has been so unanimously praised by architecture critics as the Städtische Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, opened after ten years of planning and construction time on 23^rd June 1982, the first large project realized by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. It marks the beginning of the real boom in museum-building in Germany in the last quarter of the twentieth century and it has definitively established the museum as the preferred type of building commission there.

From a number of design variants developed by the architect commissioned by the museum director, Johannes Cladders – who did not invite competition submissions – was chosen the concept described as “rice terraces;” it reacts in a very original and at the same time very sensitive fashion to the topographical situation. Hollein used the hillside location of the building site on the southern outskirts of the city centre, next to the Romanesque-Gothic minster and the Baroque provost´s residence to stage a real architectural landscape that presents itself from the foot of the Abteiberg as a collage-like ensemble of heterogeneous components that looks like the silhouette of a town.

Above curving brick walls climbing in terraced forms that are as much part of the landscape as they are part of the architecture, on a roof plateau accessible from the city via a footbridge, rises an exciting group of buildings executed in a great variety of materials. The highest one is the administration tower clad in sandstone from the Rhineland, broken open on the side facing the garden by a folded, crystalline mirrored glass wall; next to it is a low hall, also clad in sandstone, for temporary exhibitions. This presents a counterpoint to a group of square exhibition rooms with diagonal, sawtoothed shed roofs, whose lead-coloured zinc cladding provides an effective contrast to the costliness of the little entrance temple of dazzling white marble and shining stainless steel columns. This apparently unintentional ensemble – in fact artfully related by means of different alignments and perspectival axes to the existing development – and not unjustifiably interpreted as the abbreviation of a city and its building types (occasionally ironically distanced) can be considered a virtual demonstration of that multifariousness aiming at manifold associations that has become a central idea in architecture as a protest against the monotony of our towns.

Largely hidden in the Abteiberg, the interior of the museum, into which one descends from the entrance temple as if into a secret cave, is not laid out as a consistent linear course, but instead as a three-dimensional matrix of varied spatial overlappings, entrances and views. Following two principal distribution zones opening toward the mountainside are three floors, set counter to these zones at half-storey intervals and playfully connected with them by stairways, every one of them different. On these three levels are square exhibition rooms diagonally joined together on the cloverleaf principle and separated from each other by narrow intermediate zones where the supply systems and fire escapes are located. Corner access to these rooms presents an alternative to the principle of the enfilade usual in museum architecture since the nineteenth century – deriving from Baroque palace architecture – and repeatedly adopted since then. It also offers the enormous advantage of providing uninterrupted areas to hang pictures. This rational, geometric spatial organization is broken up by unexpectedly opening, freely expanding organic spatial forms, so that in the interplay of spaciousness and intimacy, clarity and moments of disorientation, comes into being the flexibility that Hollein understands as “not mobility of walls and ceilings, but the provision of multi-layered situations.” However, some spatial situations prove to be so specifically coordinated to certain objects – some of them unfortunately only temporary exhibits – that they could hardly be used adequately once the objects were removed.

The almost unsurpassable variety of lighting not only satisfies viewers’ need for change very conveniently, but is also carefully based on the sophisticated spatial organisation. Natural lighting from the side, light coming in through shed roofs or domed roof lights, artificial light from luminous ceilings, decorative spotlights, and fluorescent tubes arranged in geometric figures create a continually changing illumination that is sensitively based as much as the complex spatial organisation on Mönchengladbach’s collection of contemporary art, and at the same time, avoids any monotony. The self-assured architect programmatically describes his museum designed with a virtually inexhaustible abundance – occasionally found too rich – as an “autonomous work of art for artworks and people.”

Baumeister 10/1982, pp. 965-975 • Bauwelt 30/1982, pp. 1192-1213 (Peter Rumpf) • Deutsche Bauzeitung 12/1982, pp. 40-50 (Gerhard Ullmann) • Domus 632/1982, pp. 2-17 (Joseph Rykwert) • Ekkehard Mai, “Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach – Vom Luxus der Avantgarde: Architektur als Muse des Museums,” in: Museumskunde 47/1982, pp. 150-159 • The Architectural Review 1030/1982, pp. 55-71 (Jonathan Glancey) • Architectural Design 7-8/ 1983, pp. 110-120 • Baukultur 5/1983, pp. 18-22 (Dagmar von Naredi-Rainer) • L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 225/1983, pp. 84-103 (P. Goulet) • GA critique 6/1983, pp. 34-53 (Riichi Miyake) • Heinrich Klotz, Die Revision der Moderne, Munich, 1984, pp. 104-109 • Hans Hollein (Architecture and Urbanism), Tokyo, 1985, pp. 66-91 and pp. 137-144 • Wolfgang Pehnt, Hans Hollein. Museum in Mönchengladbach. Architektur als Collage, Frankfurt, 1986 • Hannelore Schubert, Moderner Museumsbau, Stuttgart, 1986, pp. 137-139 • Heinrich Klotz/Waltraud Krase, New Museums, London, 1986, pp. 17-20 and pp. 91-103 • Johannes Cladders, “Eine gebaute Museumstheorie: das Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach,” in: Luisa Lopez Mòreno/José Ramón Lopez Rodríguez/Fernando Mendoza Castells (eds.), El Architecto y el Museo, Jerez, 1990, pp. 38-51 and pp. 367-371 • Jost Schilgen, Neue Häuser für die Kunst, Dortmund, 1990, pp. 26-45 • Laurence Allégret, Musées, vol. 2, Paris, 1992, pp. 100-107 • Josep M. Montaner/Jordi Oliveras, Museums for a New Century, Barcelona, 1995, pp. 90-95 • Steffen Krämer, Die postmoderne Architekturlandschaft. Museumsprojekte von James Stirling und Hans Hollein, Hildesheim/Zurich/New York, 1998

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