Description
One of Gerrit Rietveld’s last works, this peaceful museum building composed of rigid prisms was executed after his death by Van Dillen and Van Tricht. The fundamental idea was to group the exhibition spaces flowing into each other (and lit for the most part by pyramidal glass skylights shaded by sun shields) around an empty central space lit from above, its open stairway inspired by the de Stijl aesthetic. By opening the exhibition rooms toward the centre, the aspect of the communicative that has since then played an increasingly important role in museum architecture is emphasized here relatively early.
In the end, the unexpectedly large numbers of visitors necessitated not only extensive renovations, but also the enlargement of the existing museum. While Martien van Goor adopts the language of the existing architecture in his extensions, above all in a glazed volume for the access area, the curved lines of the new building designed by Kisho Kurokawa present a crass contrast to Rietveld’s prismatic forms with their rough concrete surfaces. The new building is covered instead with polished granite and shimmering titanium. Under a shell-like roof, it rises over the ground plan of a half ellipse asymmetrically divided lengthways (the original circular ground plan was rejected for reasons related to town planning) whose second half as a sunken pool of water effectively stages not only the relation between the old and the new building, but also brings into focus the tension between volumes and voids as an elementary principle.
Because more than half its spatial volume is underground, the new building, whose large, oddly blurred rooms almost double the exhibition area, is kept significantly lower than the old building to which it is linked underground. The positioning of the square placed in the upper exhibition room serving for the display of prints, jutting out at an angle over the water from the forward-leaning front and thus disturbing the symmetry of the new building – while at the same time forming an exact parallel to the alignment of the old building – is characteristic of the ambivalence of this architecture that not only oscillates between deliberate autonomy and subtle reference to that which already exists, but also seeks to unite ancient Japanese tradition with uncompromising modernity.
The Architectural Review 922/1973, pp. 376-385 (Richard Padovan) • Bauen und Wohnen 1973, pp. 434 • International Lighting Review 41/1990, pp. 50-61 • Marijke Küper/Ida van Zijl, Gerrit T. Rietveld. The complete works 1888-1964, Utrecht, 1992, pp. 352-353 • Andreas Blühm (ed.), Van Gogh Museum Architecture. Rietveld to Kurokawa, Rotterdam, 1999 (Hans Ibelings) • architektur aktuell 227/1999, p. 8 • Bauwelt 16/1999, pp. 844-845 (Peter van Asche) • James Grayson Trulove, Designing the new museum. Building a new destination, Gloucester/MA, 2000, pp. 112-119
Drawings
Photos
View of the first building of the Van Gogh Museum (without the additions by Martien van Goor)
The flowing space of the exhibition rooms in the first building opens onto the central void
Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.