Description

Integrated into in a wide-ranging network of paths, a large sculpture park on an island in the Lac du Vassivière, which is accessible only by a footbridge, has at its centre an unusual building that visitors are surprised to see when they come out of the forest. On the highest point of a sloping meadow is a 27-metre high lighthouse crowned by a glassed-in viewing platform. Aldo Rossi, the architect who was deliberately entrusted with this building task, says that the tower “has always been one of my obsessions,” and here it not only makes the island into the central point of the lake, but functions as a beacon or signal in archetypal symbolism. Thus it indicates the long building lying at the foot of it, an art centre that contains a succession of rooms that can serve equally well as artists’ ateliers, exhibition halls or seminar rooms. Like the conical tower, its exterior is characterized by grey granite and red brickwork. Sparingly used motifs from the repertory of classical architecture awaken associations to an Arcadia that admittedly evades any concrete determination.

The way through the 80-metre long building laid out in five areas one behind the other, its interior sophisticatedly stacked in several levels, begins at the foot of the tower, at an open portico whose metal structure appears to be a modern abbreviation of a classical columned hall. The small-format, two-storey entrance area is followed by the long exhibition hall as the central space, spanned by a segmented wooden roof and lit by arched windows placed high in the walls that again evoke the classical without it really being possible to consider them quotes. Under one part of this exhibition hall is an artist’s atelier. On the main level, the last building section – separated from the rest of the building by an open, transversal passage – contains another exhibition room, and there is a café on the lower floor from which visitors can go outside.

L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 258/1988, pp. 72-73 (Didier Laroque) • Techniques et Architecture 387/1990, pp. 102-105 • Techniques et Architecture 399/1991, pp. 103-108 • Architectural Digest 3/1992, pp. 58-64 (M. Peppiatt) • Baumeister 9/1992, pp. 42-45 (Richard Maillinger) • Bauwelt 10/1992, p. 469 • Gianni Braghieri, Aldo Rossi, 4th ed., Zurich/Munich/London, 1993, pp. 248-249 • Alberto Farlenga, Aldo Rossi. Das Gesamtwerk, Cologne, 2001, pp. 192-195

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