Description

There were no models for a museum focusing on the cultural background and characteristics of death in all its forms throughout the ages. The starting point for the planning of this museum and a scientific institute attached to it was the remains of a villa complex in an exposed situation above the city centre, a two-storey triple-winged building in the neo-Renaissance style. The architect doubled the floor area of the old building and adopted its dimensions, but nevertheless made use of an uncompromisingly modern formal language. With lightweight concrete, steel, and glass, he created not only the greatest possible contrast to the old building’s sandstone and clinker brick, but also an “open, light, intimate” atmosphere that is almost “cheerful,” not the least of its aims being to dissipate the public’s fear of the subject matter presented here.

A narrow, building-height glass hall at the interface between the old and the new building serves as the entrance and access area. Not only does it open a glorious view over the city below, but above all, it reveals the multilayered but nevertheless transparent spatial structure of the new building. The shift in relation to the level of the old building by means of a suspended intermediate ceiling creates suspense and transforms the erstwhile external façade into an interior wall. In spite of the clarity of this spatial continuum, the exhibition levels linked to each other by open stairways differ distinctly from each other in their spatial and lighting effects. This enables the very different objects to be presented appropriately and, in addition, quickens visitors’ interest. While the lower storey, articulated only by slender pillars and bounded on two sides by room-height window walls, appears to be fluid space whose illumination is gradually reduced and continues into a dark exhibition room reminiscent of a crypt, the galleries above it are laid out around a light-flooded open space in the middle, shifted a half-storey, closed on the ground floor, but open to it on the upper floor.

wettbewerbe aktuell 5/1988, pp. 303-305 and 4/1992, pp. 4-5 • Friedhof und Denkmal 2/1988, pp. 21-25 (Hans-Kurt Boehlke) and 1-2/1992, pp. 1-32 • Architektur Innenarchitektur Technischer Ausbau (AIT) 7-8/1992, pp. 72-77 • Architektur Jahrbuch 1992, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 74-83 • Bauwelt 16/1992, pp. 900-909 (Klaus-Dieter Weiß) • The Architectural Review 1154/1993, pp. 44-48 (Anne Frey) • Wilhelm Kücker. Museum für Sepulkralkultur (Bau Werke 1, ed. Ingeborg Flagge), Berlin, 1993

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