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The new Brandhorst Museum is a signal in the urban and institutional matrix of Munich. This svelte, immaculately-assembled object gathers together many pertinent themes in contemporary architectural and museological thinking. Yet one’s first impression of the building designed by Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton is, simply, to register its presence as a spirited, multicolored neighbor to neo-Classical museums and bourgeois apartment houses. “Impression” may in fact describe the exterior essence, the way it communicates through color and its comprehensibility as a tectonic phenomenon. “Impression” also of course recalls early Modernist paintings: the agency of color, the deconstruction of light, and the integration of modern life. The Brandhorst Museum is a box. If mention of such a fundamental spatial container triggers association with the writings of Robert Venturi, with that American’s polemics regarding the significance of surface, one might consider the Brandhorst as an exquisite box, as a literal treasure chest. Yet the Brandhorst’s boxiness also results from the particularity of its site. It is the latest and perhaps the final installment in a glorious set-piece, the family of museums instigated by Leo von Klenze’s Alte Pinakothek in the early nineteenth century, poetically reconstituted by Hans Döllgast after World War II, and extended in recent years by the adjacent Pinakothek der Moderne. As such, Sauerbruch Hutton’s Brandhorst Museum is not merely an object; it is a fragment in this compound of museums and museum buildings. The freestanding building rises two tall stories above an extensive basement. As it must accommodate the practical needs of an independent museum (storage, service rooms, loading bays), much of the exterior is blank. Or, we might say, opaque. This is also due to the remarkable system of interior illumination. Lower galleries draw light from a strip of clerestory window; upper galleries are illuminated directly through a filigreed...
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Danish Radio Concert House
Ateliers Jean Nouvel
A place of music, the Concert House embodies the affinity between architecture and music. It is also a paradigm for the Jean Nouvel programme: showing...
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DRMM
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On August 4th 2009, Norway celebrated the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun with the inauguration of the Knut Hamsun Center in his home town of Hamarøy, ...
