Description

From the requirement to unite three large exhibition rooms usable together or separately, an auditorium, and a restaurant with its own entrance all into a single building that would be bounded on one side by a dual carriageway on the crest of a dyke and on the other by a lower-lying park, Rem Koolhaas developed an architectural creation that attempts to do justice to the “principles of metropolitan architecture” that he propagates. The essential design idea that grew out of the functional program consists in a continuously developed circular tour in accordance with the basic concept of a continuous loop, its linear sequence – repeatedly broken open by unexpected views backwards – imparting a succession of contrasting spatial experiences. This spindle-form movement has its starting point at the ramp that cuts right through the building. This ramp is divided by a glass wall into a public external area and an internal area belonging to the museum tour, whose spatial program is basically distributed across two levels tilted counter to each other. The constant interchange of materials and colours, varying from coloured raw concrete and metal screens to different forms of more or less transparent glass to plastic, creates a continuously changing, sometimes surreal atmosphere in which the machine-like, often gruff character of this architecture is never hidden.

At best, the complexity of the spatial organization can only be guessed at from the deliberately sober external form when nocturnal lighting allows the tension between the slanting levels and the prismatic form of the external shell to become visible. Apart from that, the design and materiality of the low volume – different on each of the four sides – only indicates that here, neither a balanced composition nor a typological representation of any kind, and certainly not an exorbitant intensification of the museum idea is intended. Rather, this building – whose tall service tower functions on purpose as a billboard – appears to be an unambiguously realistic example of urban architecture in the fragmented and contradictory urban environment.

Baumeister 11/1992, pp. 40-44 (Sabine Schneider) • AIT 7-8/1993, pp. 48-51 • ARCH+ 117/1993, pp. 50-53 • Architectural Record 3/1993, pp. 66-73 (Tracy Metz) • L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 285/1993, pp. 6-14 (Emmanuel Doutriaux) • Bauwelt 46/1993, pp. 2490-2497 (Hans van Dijk) • Domus 747/1993, pp. 38-47 (Kenneth Frampton) • Räume für Kunst, exhibition catalogue, Graz, 1993, pp. 48-49 • Techniques et Architecture 408/1993, pp. 81-88 • Architecture and Urbanism 287/1994, pp. 108-143 (Andrew MacNair) • El Croquis 79/ 1996, pp. 74-105 • Francisco Asensio Cerver, The Architecture of Museums, New York, 1997, pp. 120-127 • Victoria Newhouse, Towards a New Museum, New York, 1998, pp. 232-234 • Luca Basso Peressut, musei. architetture 1990-2000, Milan, 1999, pp. 64-93 • Wilfried Wang (ed.), World Architecture 1900-2000: A Critical Mosaic, vol. 3, Vienna/New York, 2000, pp. 234-237

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