Description

In 2012, as part of the Regionale funding programme, a competition was launched to expand the Sauerland Museum in Arnsberg into a modern educational facility. The existing museum is housed in the Landsberger Hof, a baroque palace that a Bavarian elector built for his mistress in 1605 on the edge of a rocky ridge at Arnsberg high above the River Ruhr. The building, which is a landmark visible from afar, needed restructuring but to maintain the connection with the centre of the old town the main entrance via the palace had to be retained. As such, the entrance and the permanent exhibition about the region remains in the existing palace.

In their competition design, the architects Bez + Kock inserted about three quarters of the building mass for the extension into the rock below the Landsberger Hof so that it could be accessed directly from the existing building. Externally, the temporary exhibition rooms were visible only as three discreet terraced cubes pushed into the steep slope, which when clad in local grey wacke would have looked almost like part of the rock. However, as subsequent bedrock analyses revealed, work within the rock itself risked causing fissures between the different layers of rock to shift, potentially destabilising the rock footing to the palace. The municipal client saw no option but to halt the project and ask the architects to produce a revised design. Instead of embedding the museum spaces, the new museum design pulls them forward and turns them ninety degrees to create an artificial rock through the architecture itself. The organisation of the spaces and their connection to the existing museum, however, needed to be redesigned.

Now that the new museum was a separate structure, it was no longer possible to simply descend into the exhibition spaces below the palace. Visitors now needed to be guided from the entrance in the palace down four storeys in a building to the rear, some twenty metres lower down. To avoid intruding on the silhouette of the Landsberger Hof and the “English promenade” along the city walls, a bridge was devised that leads from the vaulted cellar space of the palace to the exhibition building and in the process affords a view across the expanse of the Ruhr valley through three large window openings. The path from the entrance foyer to the bridge is via two concealed staircases. A more direct solution in the historical staircase hall was not realised due to cost constraints.

The sculptural quality of the new building is a factor both of the slanted placement of the window openings cut into its volume and its irregular footprint, which results from superimposing the alignment of the street and the Landsberger Hof. The staggered form results in successively smaller spaces on each story. The building is not immediately “legible” from outside, especially as it has no entrance at the bottom. On the third floor down, however, the interior can be opened out onto an external terrace as an outdoor event space, which the young people from the town have already appropriated as a place to meet. The terracing continues on the other side of the Ruhrstraße below in the landscaping of the bank on the Ruhr, which has become a favourite bathing spot.

To access the spaces and provide orientation in the new building, the circulation is organised around a long, single flight staircase with an open vertical stairwell so that visitors always have a point of reference.

The renovation of the Landsberger Hof itself aimed to revive the atmosphere of the old building while staying in keeping with its status as a listed building. The architects achieved this by focusing on materials and craftmanship, for example clay plaster for the walls, oak parquet flooring on the upper floors and white travertine on the ground floor.

Originally published in Bauwelt 19.2015, pp. 38-45, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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