Description

Ice age artifacts and a stock of paintings and drawings by the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers (1888-1976), who emigrated in 1933 and since 1970 has been an honorary citizen of the city of his birth occasioned the building of a new museum in the Stadtpark. It was to be linked to a villa serving as a local museum, and Bernhard Küppers, at the time director of the municipal building department of the city of Bottrop, designed a new building of steel, aluminium, and glass, strictly geometrically organized and stylistically inspired by Mies van der Rohe. It gains its significance from the contrast with the old building and above all, the mature growth of the lovingly maintained park landscape. Three diagonally linked volumes of different heights, each on a square ground plan of 21.15 x 21.15 metres, are accessed from the central pavilion. They house very different facilities, a media centre (in the middle), a museum for prehistory, and a modern gallery. The daylight illumination by means of asymmetrically arranged storey-height glazing, its dimensions derived from the modular grid structure, can be supplemented at any point by additional spotlights that are concealed in the gridwork of the ceiling.

A large donation from the estate of Josef Albers led in 1977 to the extension (planned from the inception) of the first building phase, called the “Quadrat.” The ground plan – again square – and its interior layout are definitely to be understood here as a homage to Josef Albers, whose geometrically abstract picture forms found their final simplification in the famous Square pictures. Larger dimensions (28.2 x 28.2 metres ground plan) and a clear distinction from the existing building volume emphasize the specific significance of the two-storey Albers Museum. On the other hand, the integration and linking of the building into the complex as whole takes place structurally by retaining the basic module of 7.05 metres – now quadrupled – and spatially by means of a transparent bridge from the central media space. While the rooms of the first building phase were easily perceptible, the new building, strictly governed by the modular grid and opened to exciting perspectives by means of asymmetric wall openings, develops its height in a graduated fashion. A relatively low surrounding corridor economically lit from the side circumscribes a higher, square central room provided with overhead light by sawtooth roofs. In this room, Albers’ meditative Square pictures, the heart of the collection, invite visitors to linger.

Baukultur 5/1983, pp. 4-6 (Bernhard Küppers) • Bauwelt 20-21/1985, pp. 792-95 (Jörg Johnen) • Laurence Allégret, Musées, Paris, 1987, pp. 48-53 • Ulrich Schumacher/Bernhard Küppers, Architektur – Kunst – Natur. Das Museum in Bottrop, Bottrop, 1988

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