Description

The regional museum in the heart of the small Hessian town of Korbach, housed in three little buildings at the foot of the Gothic tower of St. Kilian’s church, was to be expanded. The architect fulfilled the requirement associated with the expansion, to renovate the dilapidated ensemble (heterogeneous due to empty sites) of stone and half-timbered buildings – some of them listed – without reconstructing a historical situation, by adopting the small-scale structure of the old development, but translating it into monolithic individual volumes. The sculptural form of these new buildings covered with local muschelkalk betrays the fact that for several years Berthold Penkhues worked with Frank O. Gehry, whose overloaded formal language is here, however, subordinated to the local historical context and sensitively implemented. One aspect of this is that the individual building segments are not jumbled up against each other, but instead are separated by narrow lanes corresponding to the mediaeval fire lanes. Here, they serve as access ways and moreover, create numerous interconnecting views to facilitate orientation. These glazed interfaces linking old and new volumes into a sophisticatedly articulated whole on the scale of the original town structure also allow views into the interior of the museum. From the courtyard of the church, a new entrance building of stone leads between two old half-timbered buildings into the interior. Here, a glazed, two-storey hall interconnects all the museum rooms via individual access ways, opening changing perspectives onto the old buildings, the small interior courtyard, and the church tower as well, from which the entire ensemble can be seen, resembling a small town staged deliberately so that not only can it be experienced as a dialectic interplay of old and new building elements, but also, the exhibition building itself is made into a display object.

wettbewerbe aktuell 10/1991, pp 695-704 and 10/1997, pp. 91-94 • architektur aktuell 207/1997, pp. 64-73 (Katja Behn) • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 10/1997, pp. 51-56 • Naturstein architektur 1/1997, pp. 6-14 • wettbewerbe aktuell 10/1997, pp. 91-93 • Detail 6/1999, pp. 1002-1004

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