Description

In order to accommodate exhibitions of modern art that would not otherwise have found a venue, it was decided at the end of the eighties to adapt the Hamburger Bahnhof. The building had had an eventful history; built in 1846/47 by Georg Ernst Friedrich Neuhaus and Ferdinand Wilhelm Holz as the terminus of the Berlin-Hamburg railway line, it only fulfilled this function for a few decades, and then became a residential and administrative building before it was converted into a transportation and railway museum in 1906. For this, Ernst Schwartz replaced (among other things) what had been the structure containing the passenger platforms with the three-naved hall with a structural frame of iron that now – almost unchanged – forms the centre of the complex. The two wings were also erected in the early twentieth century; together with the historicizing entrance façade, they form a cour d’honneur whose round flowerbed reminds one of the locomotive turntable that used to be there.

The redesign of this building complex, badly damaged in 1943 and then allowed to fall into a state of disrepair in the postwar years, started with the meticulous restoration of the existing architecture, supplemented by two symmetrically arranged galleries on the sides of the central exhibition hall. As its extension, a square sculpture courtyard (still unrealized, like the westernmost of the two new gallery wings) is to conclude the ensemble’s northern end.

In reaction to the disparate character of the individual elements accessed clearly by a few new stairways and ramps, the design tries to generate a unified architecture by geometric references between its elements and in so doing, at the same time to pick up the thread of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s design principles, considered exemplary. This becomes particularly apparent in the exhibition rooms of the entrance wings, whose autonomous existing dimensions are brought into relation to each other through the quadratic subdivided illuminated ceiling. In spite of its entirely independent character, the new gallery too – which gains its effect from the tension between the mild toplight of the ceiling vaulting and the lateral light in the depth of the room – obeys strict geometric laws: completed into a circle, the daylight barrel vault – recognizable, by the way, as a quotation of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – would exactly intersect with the outer edge of the floor of the 80-meter long room.

Bauwelt 47/1996, pp. 2664-2671 (Peter Rumpf) • Deutsche Bauzeitung 10/1996, pp. 20-24 (Falk Jaeger) • Walter Kambartel, “Zwischen geflügeltem Rad und Pegasus. Der Ausbau des Hamburger Bahnhofs zum Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst”, in: Andrea Meseke/Thorsten Scheer (eds.), Josef Paul Kleihues, Basel, 1996, pp. 216-244 • Thorsten Scheer, Hamburger Bahnhof. Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Cologne, 1996 • Baumeister 2/1997, pp. 52-59 (Wolfgang Bachmann) • Detail 6/1997, pp. 928-933 • Werk, Bauen und Wohnen 7-8/1997, pp. 49-51 (Gerhard Ullmann) • Luca Basso Peressut, musei. architetture 1990-2000, Milan, 1999, pp. 131-139 • Frank Maier-Solgk, Die neuen Museen, Cologne, 2002, pp. 58-64

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