Description

The restoration of the area around Paderborn cathedral provided the opportunity to erect a diocesan museum. Gottfried Böhm’s design adopts the proportions of the old urban structure.

The four-storey main building of the museum is situated on the northern side of the marketplace, right next to the main entrance of the cathedral. While this main building is as tall as the cathedral’s nave, to the north a lower wing destined for offices is attached to it. This office wing is angled around the cathedral, ending precisely at the foot of the mighty western tower of the cathedral. Thus a dialectic relation comes into being between the mediaeval church building and the massively structured shape of the museum, which makes it impossible to see the cathedral as a whole except from certain precisely calculated angles. The skin of grey lead that unites the façade and the roof of the museum, which is supported by four columns, into a three-dimensional unit matches the roofing of the cathedral in both size and colour. In contrast, the ground floor, which is set back somewhat, is glazed so that the marketplace seems to be incorporated into the museum.

Providing a counterpoint to the building’s forbiddingly ‘closed’ external aspect, Gottfried Böhm designed the interior as an “open museum.” Apart from a treasure chamber built into the mediaeval vault of the cellar, it consists of an undivided room whose different levels – linked by a continuously climbing circuit – afford visitors views into all the other levels. The silver-grey colour of the interior space and its furnishings as well as the accumulation of rod-like elements on landings and plinths generated a high-tech atmosphere which took away the religious aura from the exhibits – mostly sculptural – thus virtually objectifying them.

Soon after the opening of the museum, building defects already started to appear, mainly in the HVAC system. Finally it was decided to set a new inner shell into the existing external skin of the building in accordance with a design by the English exhibition architect Michael Brawne. Although this leaves the spatial structure of Böhm’s architecture untouched to a great extent, it replaces its transparency marked by glass and metal with cream-coloured wall surfaces, creating an entirely different spatial effect. The result renders visible the dilemma between curatorial conditions that are unquestionably better and a loss of architectural stringency.

Bauwelt 2/1976, pp. 52-59 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 9/1977, pp. 1115-1118 • Ulrich S. von Altenstadt, “Zwiesprache zwischen Alt und Neu,” in: Der Architekt 2/1979, pp. 105-107 • Hannelore Schubert, Moderner Museumsbau, Stuttgart, 1986, pp. 104-105 • Bauwelt 34/1992, pp. 1883 (Karin Jansen) • Diözesanmuseum Paderborn 1913-1993. Commemorative volume on the occasion of the reopening on 18th June 1993, Paderborn, 1994 • Wolfgang Pehnt, Gottfried Böhm, Basel, 1999, pp. 86-87

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