Description

The location of the art gallery in Mannheim is lauded in guidebooks as “one of the most completely preserved neo-baroque and art nouveau ensembles in Germany”. Laid out at the end of the 19th century, the horseshoe-shaped Gartenplatz with the water tower was followed by the Parkhotel (now the Maritim), the Rosengarten Festival Hall and the arcaded buildings by Bruno Schmitz at the entrance to the Augusta complex, and finally in 1907 the Kunsthalle by Hermann Billing (1867-1946). In 1983, the Art Nouveau art gallery was given an extension by Lange-Mitzlaff-Böhm-Müller. In 2012, an invited international competition produced three prize-winning proposals of equal rank, and in the second round the commission went to Gerkan Marg + Partner who won out against Staab Architekten and Peter Pütz. Completed in 2017, the building is the first large museum building by the Hamburg-based architecture office in Europe and bears their unmistakable signature.

One enters the building, past the restaurant, through an extremely high glass slot and is drawn into the foyer, which extends upwards to the glass roof. The architects speak of a public market square with alleys and steps that is open to the public without paying for a ticket. “A city within a city” was the architects’ principle for the art cabinets of the gallery – which the Mannheimer have inevitably dubbed cubes. These are connected by the passages, bridges and galleries around this 22-metre-high atrium. Only the ground floor is intended for temporary, changing exhibitions, but the other gallery spaces will inevitably have to adapt correspondingly: one no longer hangs artworks “for eternity”, according to the director Ulrike Lorenz. A passageway designed by James Turrell leads through the renovated Athens wing into the existing Art Nouveau building, which is visible as two high sandstone portals. On one’s journey through the five to six-metre-tall cubes, one passes views like the one through a giant window of the magnificent water tower, some of which invite one to contemplate the art, others the contrast with the urban reality outside. The spatial placement of the architecture, with its shafts, vistas and narrow passages, ensures that one is never bored. The intention is to offer visitors new interpretations instead of firmly contoured experiences. As such one finds Anselm Kiefer next to Caspar David Friedrich. A Schaulager serves as an art depot of sorts, displaying other works without a specific thematic narrative. This concept runs the risk of turning the building into a general store. As the director says: “art and architecture should enter into a new relationship”!

From outside, the building reveals little of the possibilities within. The building brings no groundbreaking new ideas to this architecturally important part of Mannheim. The magnificent urban ornament of the gardens is still cut off from the city by the 40,000 vehicles that pass by every day. The new insertion, like the Rosengarten Congress Centre on the other side of the square, merely steps back a little from the building line of the arcade buildings and the hotel at the block corner. The existing Art Nouveau building, once centrepiece, is relegated to the status of a garden pavilion. When the competition winner was announced, the director of the Kunsthalle spoke of a “self-assured dialogue” between the building and its “urban context”. By the time of the opening, this had been downgraded to a “dialectic”. The new building is the antithesis of the red sandstone monuments, a new element that asserts its presence but raises new questions, an element that eludes to the aestheticization of urban space.

Originally published in Bauwelt 03.2018, pp. 44-49, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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