Description

The form of the tongue of land available as a building site, between a lock on the Canal du Midi and the Rhône to the south of the Provencal city of Arles (which has a plethora of monuments from Roman antiquity) made Henri Ciriani choose a triangular ground plan for the building. In addition to an archaeological museum, it also houses a research institute for classical antiquity and the central administration for the museums in Arles. These three functional areas are grouped around the interior courtyard, which not only repeats the ground plan form of the equilateral triangle – determined at the outset by urban planning reasons – but, in contrast, also becomes the starting point of a spiral-form movement which becomes visible on the outside as a dynamic effect in the “open façades” jutting out above the geometric corner points. These three different façades of the transversally positioned building are partly closed and partly cut-out, structurally independent walls. Repeatedly, three-dimensional volumes break through these walls, which occasionally permit views deep inside the building as well. In this way, the façades are both a spatial skin and a space-forming element at the same time. The vivid colour of its blue enamelling, which is undoubtedly also to be understood as a homage to the sky of southern France, contrasts with the matte white and grey tones of the other architectural elements and thus emphasizes an architectural understanding of plastic-geometric three-dimensionality following the tradition of classical modernism. A vast hall at the eastern corner gives access to the building, the museum part of which is homogene­ously lit by means of sawtooth roofs opening northwards and also by bands of windows placed high in the walls. The use of slender columns permits this exhibition area to function as a flowing continuum without subdivisions around the interior courtyard, allowing circular tours of varying length. Slight differences in level not only enable the objects to be presented effectively, but also generate the moment of movement that eventually leads over a narrow stairway in the inner courtyard to the roof of the museum, from which a wonderful 360 degree view is to be had. Two triangular wall segments framing this stairway and towering above the museum to good effect illustrate its ground plan structure once again in the third dimension, as it were.

Architectural Design 11-12/1984, pp. 44-47 • Casabella 523/1986, pp. 4-13 (Jean-Paul Robert) • Laurence Allégret, Musées, Paris, 1987, pp. 106-109 • L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 282/1992, pp. 102-111 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 8/1995, pp. 84-85 • Bauwelt 10/1996, pp. 507-509 (Kaye Geipel) • Luciana Miotto, Henri E. Ciriani. Contextual architecture and the pièce urbaine, Turin, 1996, pp. 74-82 • Francisco Asensio Cerver, The Architecture of Museums, New York, 1997, pp. 108-119 • Mauro Galantino, Henri Ciriani. Architecture 1960-2000, Milan, 2000, pp. 60-61, pp. 72-85 • Arian Mostaedi, museums and art facilities, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 32-41 • Friedbert Kind-Barkauskas/Bruno Kauhsen/Stefan Polónyi/Jörg Brandt, Concrete Construction Manual, 2. ed., Basel, 2002, pp. 212-215

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