Description

The architect mentions both the location in a skyscraper canyon running up to Lake Michigan and the reference to Chicago as architectural genius loci – strongly marked not least by Mies van der Rohe – as decisive factors in his design, modest and pragmatic in service to function without denying its theoretical basis. Chosen in an unusual selection procedure in which not the designs submitted, but all the works of each of the 226 applicants was examined, Kleihues demonstrates with this museum design his principles of a “poetic rationalism” that assumes the validity of universal laws without underestimating historical conditions or ignoring the suspenseful complexity of our lived reality.

Clear proportions developed from the square characterize the building, which is supplemented by a sculpture garden (also square), both in its spatial structure and in its delicately-drawn surfaces. The latticed windows, condensed into a glazed front on the façade, and the cast iron slabs with which the entire building is clad, iridescent with a brownish patina, are subservient to the unifying formal strength of geometry.

Both the façade – whose monumental open stair­-way framed by projecting bays intentionally reminds one of the propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis and Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin – and – notwithstanding its great sophistication – the arrangement of the interior, varying from one level to the next, are symmetrically designed with the exception of the ground floor which, containing an auditorium among other things, is accessed by another entrance. On the two upper main floors the exhibition rooms on both sides of the building-high, light-flooded atrium are wonderfully proportioned, but very different in character and in their organisation. While on the entrance level, accessible directly by the open stairway, enormous square rooms with artificial illuminated ceilings are intended to house temporary exhibitions, the permanent collection is displayed in four parallel galleries whose elegant glazed barrel vaults disseminate evenly distributed daylight coming in from the pyramid roofs above.

Architectural Record 5/1992, p. 23 (James Krohe Jr.) and 8/1996, pp. 80-87 (Cheryl Kent) • Architecture (AIA) 5/1992, p. 23 (Blair Kamin) and 6/1996, pp. 38-39 (Franz Schulze) • Progressive Architecture 5/1992, p. 27 (Cheryl Kent) and 12/1995, p. 30 (Cheryl Kent) • Domus 739/1992, pp. 48-53 and XXII (Josef P. Kleihues) • Architekt 10/1996, p. 596 (Falk Jaeger) • Building Design 1274/1996, pp. 12-13 (Jeremy Melvin/Nicola Martin) • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 11/1996, pp. 91-94 (Falk Jaeger) and 3/1997, pp. 35-42 (Frank F. Drewes) • Andrea Mesecke/Thorsten Scheer, Museum of Contemporary Art. Josef Paul Kleihues, Berlin, 1996 • Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani/Angeli Sachs (eds.), Museums for a New Millennium, Munich/London/New York, 1999, pp. 132-139 (Franz Schulze)

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