Description
Directed Sequences of Rooms
The closed sequence of rooms referred to as an enfilade dates back to the representative secular architecture of the Baroque era. As the museum developed into an autonomous building type in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, architects fell back on this motif of palace architecture, connecting rooms of the same or different sizes so that the doors along a single axis enabled a view through all the rooms. In the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the line of large exhibition rooms was supplemented by a long line of cabinets also linked in enfilade and connected at certain intervals to the large halls. Out of this resulted a combination of a main route and a variety of auxiliary routes.
Since then, this principle of visitor routing has determined not only the majority of the museums of the nineteenth century, but was also adopted repeatedly in the museum buildings of the last decades. Even if such a clear and programmatic arrangement of the exhibition rooms following the model of the nineteenth century as the one to be found in the Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie remains the exception, room connections like the enfilade that allow a view through at least three rooms and thereby justify the term ‘directed sequence of rooms’ are to be found so frequently in the museum architecture of the last decades that it is not by chance that this category in our selection is represented with the most examples. However, it subsumes not only sequences of rooms with unambiguous visitor routing, but also the numerous filiations and augmentations of this principle, in which a main direction is recognizable, but alternative routes are also allowed. Among these are all those solutions in which a main route, often called a museum street or museum passage, accesses the exhibition rooms, occasionally interlinked, that are separated from it. A variety of graduations and interpenetrations of a ‘directed sequence of rooms’ such as those that determine the ground plan structure of the Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery introduce the transition to the next category of ground plan forms, the matrix-like arrangement of rooms.
Matrix-like Arrangement of Rooms
The term “matrix” used in biology to designate topsoil, and in connection with physics,
referring to the simultaneous control of different parameters and finally, in mathematics, designating a particular scheme of figures and other quantities, here stands for the overlapping and ambiguity of spatial structures. Exhibition rooms are linked to each other in such a way that visitors are no longer conducted by a single route associated with auxiliary routes, but instead they are always offered a number of equal alternatives for continuing on their way. Beginning with the relatively simple spatial structure of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, which in many respects still exhibit the traits of a “directed sequence of rooms,” the complexity of the spatial connections increases in the subsequent examples and in the end, does not remain limited in each case to one level (particularly in Hans Hollein’s museums) but extends to the vertical interlinking of levels staggered in counterpoint to each other by means of an almost extravagant use of ramps and stairways.
Spatial Interpenetration and Spatial Isolation
While the relationship of the rooms to each other and their spatial interconnection were the selection criteria in the first two categories, the criterion for the three following, is the quality of the spaces themselves. That pair of opposites, spatial interpenetration and spatial isolation, attempts to name a phenomenon that is associated with two important design principles of classical modernism: the concept of flowing space and the preference for pavilion-like structures. These two architectural phenomena are often combined, but they can also be mutually exclusive. Therefore we find very different buildings here, from the monumental solidity of Bielefeld’s Kunsthalle, whose open exhibition levels can, however, also be regarded as classic examples of flowing spaces, to the staggered ensemble of Davos’ Kirchner Museum, which consists of largely isolated pavilions. In the refined spatial structure of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the principle of flowing spaces is elevated to a complex interpenetration of spaces with spiral-form access, and in the layout of the Louisiana Museum – which has been repeatedly extended – we find individual pavilions connected by long passageways linked together into a unified whole composed of a number of rooms enclosing and interpenetrating each other.
Open Plans
Especially in the sixties and seventies, the open plan was not only considered a model of democratic transparency, but also, as a supposedly neutral pattern, provided the prerequisite for a multitude of transformation possibilities achievable by technical means. The most spectacular example of this is the Centre Pompidou, whose original conception has to a large extent been lost, however, by the subsequent addition of fittings. Nonetheless, this architecture conceived as a “flexible container” is programmatically placed at the beginning of our selection of museum buildings whose open structure is appropriate not least for didactically arranged science museums like the newMetropolis or Domus. Two museums, the Kunsthaus in Bregenz and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, whose very different rooms – that are in any case to be classified as “open” – are no longer intended to be understood as neutral envelopes, but instead as manifestations of the epitome of architectural space.
Free-form Spaces
The characteristic that is common to museum buildings with free-form spaces, whose labelling ranges from “expressive” to “deconstructivist” to “plastic” and “organic” is the rejection of the prismatic form based on the axiom of the right angle. As the uniqueness of their appearance lies primarily in the extravagance (very differently motivated) of their architectural form, buildings such as the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, The Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann are collected together under the category of free-form spaces, although they also meet – and in this sequence – the criteria for “spatial interpenetration,” “directed sequences of rooms” or “open plans.” Even the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is considered to be the epitome of that ‘plastic architecture’ that breaks with all architectural conventions also has a sequence of rooms linked in enfilade on a square or rectangular ground plan.
Yet the declared intention of all these buildings to underline the ‘museum’ purpose not least through their architecture understood as autonomous work of art justifies the appropriateness of the organizational category of “free-form spaces.”
Internal Links
Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.