Description

An antiquated little museum not far from Feldhof Cave, where the remains of the skeleton of an ice age man were found in 1859, was to be replaced by a new building to display human evolution, focusing on the Neanderthal period in particular. Against the jury’s recommendation, it was the project that was rated second in the competition that was executed, its form logically and consistently developed from the content of the museum. Günter Zamp Kelp, who, as a member of the Haus-Rucker-Co Group had become known in the sixties and seventies with “objects to expand consciousness,” designed his museum as a climbing spiral-formed ramp rising out of the ground and into the air “as a synonym for infinity,” and thereby, according to the architect, as a “spatial parable for the development of mankind, which after all is part of infinity.”

The exterior of the exhibition building of cast reinforced concrete (the administrative and service rooms are housed in a modest building next to it) is entirely clad with narrow, storey-height double-glazed panes roughened on the inside, whose artificial green creates an allusive tension in relation to the natural greens of the surroundings. Narrow bands of moulding trace both the amoeba-like ground plan of the museum and the gentle rise of the spiral-shaped ramp inside it, on which unfolds the whole scenario of a multimedia presentation of the history of mankind. In the centre of the interior space unencumbered by columns, a narrow stairway, illuminated by natural light coming through equally narrow openings in the ceiling, runs through the entire building. Experiencing the museum as a cave-like spatial continuum, visitors may use the ramp, the stairway (with several landings to pass over to the ramp) or a lift to reach the top floor, which finally opens into a tubular space that juts out above the building, ending in a glass wall high above the ground. This is an ambiguous architectural metaphor that cleverly illustrates the questions ”where do we come from? where are we going?” – and makes an ironic comment, for at the spiral’s glass end we find the café.

wettbewerbe aktuell 3/1994, pp. 53-64 • architektur aktuell 198/1996, pp. 48-61 (Lisbeth Wächter-Böhm) • Bauwelt 47/1996, pp. 2654-2657 (Michael Baumunk) • Neanderthal Museum, Exhibition Catalogue Aedes West, Berlin, 1996 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 2/1997, p. 38 • Architektur-Jahrbuch 1997, Frankfurt, 1997, pp. 136-141 (Axel Drieschner) • Contemporary Museums (Architectural Design Profile 130), London, 1997, pp. 26-29

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