Description

A modern science museum which has the aim of making mankind, the human body, and human culture comprehensible in an appealing fashion should also attract attention with an unusual architectural form. Of very different origins and persuasions, the two architects who were commissioned to design this museum so open to experimentation developed a building structure that started with the specific topography, letting the building appear as if it were a continuation of nature using its own means. It therefore presents a clear contrast to the conventional forms of the surrounding buildings. Above a bay on the seacoast, the dark, gently curving building sits upon the cliffs and cyclopean boulders of shimmering reddish granite. The double curve of this façade of screwed down slate slabs awakens associations that are contradictory but nonetheless quite justified – of a sail bellying out in the wind or a paralysed tank, its interior shrouded in mystery. In contrast to this organically rounded form, the side of the museum facing the city, irregularly sawtoothed and of grey granite, thus continuing the structure of the cliff formation, functions like a demonstration of the anorganic principle. Or are the two so different façades supposed to be understood as metaphors for the antagonism between nature and culture?

The interior, lighted almost exclusively from above and bathed in an atmosphere of the experimental, consists essentially of an extended room, 17 metres high, divided by an irregularly formed gallery into two levels on which the scenario of the inter­active transfer of knowledge can unfold. Separated from this spatial continuum are only the service rooms on the bottom floor illuminated from the exterior by a narrow band of windows and an event auditorium above the wide stairway, which leads from the street paralleling the shore below the museum and through it to the cave-like entrance on the side facing the city.

The Architectural Review 1183/1995, pp. 58-62 (Carolyn Jarvitts) • GA Document 44/1995, pp. 74-83 • Isozaki & Domus, eds. Ayunamento de la Coruña-Domus-Cubiertas, La Coruña, 1995 • Bauwelt 40/1996, pp. 2306-2309 (David Cohn) • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 1/1996, pp. 28-29 • El Croquis 76/1996, pp. 78-91 • Francisco Asensio Cerver, The Architecture of Museums, New York, 1997, pp. 60-71 • Arian Mostaedi, museums and art facilities, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 156-165 • Luca Basso Peressut, musei. architetture 1990-2000, Milan, 1999, pp. 112-119

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