Description

The Sprengel brand – the confectionery company founded in 1851 – like Hanomag, Continental, Bahlsen or Pelikan, once belonged to the list of illustrious companies hailing from the city of Hanover. Although production in Hanover ceased in 1980, the name remains part of the city due to Bernhard Sprengel, the last owner of the company, who donated his art collection to the city of Hanover on the condition that it erect a new building to house it. The “Kunstmuseum Hannover mit Sammlung Sprengel” opened in 1979 with works by Chagall, Léger, Max Ernst, Klee, Miró, Picasso, Nolde and Beckmann, among others, and five years later, on the occasion of the patron’s 85th birthday, was renamed the “Sprengel Museum”. In addition to the Sprengel Collection, the building also showed works of 20th century art owned by the city and the federal state.

The existing building by Peter and Ursula Trint (Cologne) and Dieter Quast (Heidelberg), the product of a competition in 1972/73, is a typical building of the seventies: the pavement of the street space extends up an artificial hill, into the entrance area and then over the sculpture garden down to the museum’s “moat” from which all the exhibition rooms are reached. Bridges and stairs cross the main axis of circulation at different levels and its spatial organisation is somewhat labyrinthine. In 1989, the inner “street” through the museum was extended and a sequence of top-lit rooms and a large auditorium were added.

Twenty years later, the decision was made not to realise the extension planned from the outset by Trint and Quast, but to hold a new competition, which was won by the Zurich-based office of Meili Peter Architekten. The new 1400 m² worth of exhibition space increases the total area for presenting works of art to 7000 m² and is housed in a compact orthogonal volume which now forms the southern end of the museum complex. Above the two-storey, partially submerged base housing the technical services, depots and workshops, a new box made of anthracite-coloured, polished exposed concrete cantilevers forward. Its surface is rhythmically articulated with deep panel-like indentations, the pattern of which alludes to the design principles of abstract or constructivist art. The resulting play of light over the facade is dramatic: the deep recesses cast dark shadows that alternate with silvery shimmering, almost velvet-like surfaces.

The idea of “dancing rooms” in the interior was part of the competition design right from the start. The ten exhibition rooms vary in their proportions, floor plan areas, orientation and room height and are always entered from diagonally-opposite entrances. Although inserted into a rectangular ground plan, the orientation of each room is offset by a few degrees to that of its neighbour. The luminous ceilings in all the exhibition spaces provide a mixture of natural and artificial light, whereby “irregularities” caused by clouds in the sky are not filtered out in order to avoid the rooms appearing too sterile and artificial. The continuous grey terrazzo flooring, white walls and luminous ceilings contribute to the impression of a spatial continuum, but each space has its own characteristics due to their varying shapes. While these differences are not immediately apparent at first glance, they shape the spatial structure. With their purist rooms, the architects make reference to the early design principles of German-Swiss museum architecture, the first of which were the Kirchner Museum in Davos by Gigon/Guyer and the Goetz Collection by Herzog & de Meuron in Munich, which both opened in 1992.

A large hall that can be used as a foyer or function room with a curved staircase and ramp construction connects old and new and a mobile by Alexander Calder is planned for the centre of the ceiling. The new exhibition halls on the upper floor can be reached from the museum’s “street” so that the path through the museum becomes a circuit. Both inside and out, Meili & Peter’s additions retain their creative autonomy, and yet establish connections. In order to strengthen the connection to the outside areas, the circuit through the museum is interrupted at three points by loggia-like resting areas with no art. Here, the anthracite-coloured concrete facade of the museum folds inwards like a pocket, its full-height glazing allowing one’s gaze to wander across and over the Maschsee lake outside. The extension was soon dubbed “a briquette for art”, a term that the museum director Reinhard Spieler finds a fitting and energizing metaphor.

Originally published in Bauwelt 43.2015, pp. 28-33, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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