Description

“Inventing ‘city’ – in this case, ‘art city’ – in the no-man’s-land somewhere between Bonn and Bad Godesberg,” was the way Axel Schultes described the problem of designing his museum building. The architect reacted to the position of the site on a four-lane road in a boring and faceless development at the edge of Bonn’s government quarter (which had never been properly developed) by rigorously cutting it off. On three sides, his volume executed in exposed concrete (and subsequently brightened up by glazing) is stereometrically and austerely closed. It is only on the fourth side that it demonstratively opens up to the Bundeskunsthalle that Schultes had conceived with the Kunstmuseum as a closed museum area. However, after an additional competition, it was Gustav Peichl’s design that was chosen for the Bundeskunsthalle, and it only took up Schultes’ idea of the “city within a city” to a very limited extent.

A smooth wall, broken through only in sections by severely drawn window openings, concludes the museum to the north and toward the road to the east. It is only at a second glance that it becomes clear that not all of the 13-metre high wall is part of the museum building, but instead, it goes beyond this to become a kind of city wall – partially cut open at its full height – behind which there is a courtyard bounded on the other side by the real museum façade, now no longer hermetically closed but instead at least in part invitingly opened. One does not realize until one passes through the outer wall that on its inner side there is a narrow building wing (destined for the administration) whose roof is carried beyond the wall opening, so that the ‘city wall’ eventually turns into an integral part of a stereometric whole again. As a bounded area, this formal dialectic – from the perspective of content an apt and easily comprehensible metaphor for a museum – not only continues at the southern façade facing the Bundeskunsthalle, but instead becomes a virtuoso interplay of geometric volumes and elementary tectonic motives, in which architecture thematizes itself. Slender columns that only seem to be placed without any rhyme or rhythm and the elegantly curving roof show that architectural design includes not only tectonic weight and static austerity but also graceful lightness and dynamic movement.

The basic structure of this museum building is developed out of the elementary geometric figures of the square and the circle that interpenetrate each other several times and in so doing, generate a complex figuration. The starting point is the basic square of 93 metres per side that is divided by a diagonal into two triangles. While one of these two triangles contains only the entrance area and the administration wing, the rest of it remaining open to a large extent, in the second are located the square or rectangular exhibition rooms, whose positioning and varying sizes are generated by a concentric reduction of the original square at varying intervals.

Situating the access between the individual rooms in their corners not only produces the largest possible expanses of hanging areas, but above all, results in exciting diagonal view axes that often open onto the room-height glass walls, which in turn open the outermost rooms of the three directed sequences of exhibition rooms arranged at angles to each other to the courtyard. Apart from these rooms with lateral light, the remaining rooms on the lower floor are illuminated by artificial light while on the upper floor, evenly distributed, shadow-free daylight comes in through square cassettes formed of crosspieces and troughs.

However, the architectural core in all the senses of the word is the stairway laid out in the form of a double cone in the centre of the building. Accompanied by a correspondingly dramatic staging of light, visitors are almost literally drawn up its steps, at first convex and then concave. This central rotunda – a motif repeatedly taken up and varied in museum architecture – is accommodated in the corner of a cubic volume whose ground plan outline is precisely developed from the total structure, appearing to shift itself out of the museum forecourt and into the collection wing, thereby endowing the building with additional complexity and tension. On the lower floor it contains a lecture hall laid out like an arena, on the ground floor, the spacious foyer and on the upper floor, exhibition rooms, whose position shifts the rotunda to the centre visually as well. From here, a multitude of views both inward and outward are opened; as a constant puzzle play between inside and outside, once again it makes architecture itself into an exhibition object before it discreetly withdraws itself in the exhibition rooms and enables a presentation of the collections – pictures and drawings of the Rheinischer Expressionism around August Macke as well as contemporary works by German artists – as unpretentious as it is generous.

wettbewerbe aktuell, 5/1985, pp. 251-270 and 7/1992, pp. 89-100 • Baumeister 8/1985, pp. 17-21 • Baumeister 9/1992, pp. 16-21 (Wolfgang Bachmann) • Bauwelt 26/1992, pp. 1518-1527 • Ingeborg Flagge, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 1992 • Deutsche Bauzeitung 4/1993, pp. 40-49 (Ingeborg Flagge) • Techniques et Architecture 408/1993, pp. 60-65 • Charlotte Frank (ed.), Axel Schultes. Kunstmuseum Bonn, Berlin, 1994 • Friedbert Kind-Barkauskas/Bruno Kauhsen/Stefan Polónyi/Jörg Brandt, Concrete Construction Manual, 2nd ed. Basel, 2002, pp. 206-209 • Frank Maier-Solgk, Die neuen Museen, Cologne, 2002, pp. 80-89

---

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