ABTEIBERG MUNICIPAL MUSEUM,MÖNCHENGLADBACH, GERMANY

Designed by Hans Hollein; completed 1982
Since the 1990s, it has not been uncommon for architects and their clients to break
with the two previously prevailing alternatives—temple or warehouse—for art museums,
but such a typological rupture had been dramatically anticipated two decades earlier, by
Hans Hollein in the Museum Abteiberg, a unique building tailored to an unusual site and
a distinctive collection. The Pritzker Prize laureate of 1985, who was born in Vienna in
1934 and is an artist, teacher, and creator of furniture, interiors, and exhibitions, has at
Mönchengladbach assembled a virtual primer of museum design, one that has brought a
heretofore unknown visceral excitement to the vocation of museum going. In contrast to
later attempts in this genre, however, Hollein’s achievement has contributed to an
intensified appreciation of the museum’s contents rather than making a personal
statement at their expense.
Although Hollein has learned from the institutional buildings of Louis I.Kahn and
Alvar Aalto, he listens to his own music, which—to pursue the metaphor—includes
concerti from the 18th, symphonies from the 19th, and popular songs from the 20th
centuries. His eclecticism served him well in this complex commission, made more
difficult by the need for the museum to serve urban as well as aesthetic ends. Hollein has
linked Mönchengladbach’s town center on the heights with the medieval Ettal Abbey
(today the city hall) on the slopes below, assembling a multi-tiered museum from a series
of discrete elements of different sizes and shapes that provide a series of delightfully
varied indoor and outdoor rooms. Distributing the individual volumes in space rather than
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containing them within a monolithic whole allowed him to maintain the picturesque scale
of the town; at the subterranean level, the disparate sections are united.
Although designing a museum is always challenging, it is perhaps less onerous when,
in contrast to those encyclopedic institutions that are in continual flux, its holdings
consist of a focused group of works. Kahn found such a golden opportunity in the
Kimbell Museum, and Hollein has exploited the similar possibilities here, where he
worked closely with the director, Jonathan Cladders, in formulating the program. They
believe that today the museum itself represents a Ges amtkunstwerk (total work of art), “a huge scenario
into which the individual work is fitted…not the autonomy of the work at any price but
the deliberately staged correspondence between space and work of art” (Klotz, 1985, p. 19). This especially applies to contemporary art, which frequently is
deliberately produced for a museum setting. The plan that Hollein and Cladders evolved
is without precedent for this building type. None of the customary tropes, whether
conventional or modern—vaulted galleries arranged symmetrically, the universal space,
the proverbial white cube—are present. Instead, the combination of small, contained
cabinets and larger rooms perfectly accommodates a collection that, although including
some historical pieces, is mainly focused on the post-World War II period and, although
international, is richly endowed with work by American artists of such competing
movements as Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Pop. Many works are in the
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form of installations without customary boundaries or frames and do not necessarily
require natural light.
From the town, one enters the museum precinct via an elevated walkway that leads to
a stone-faced platform whereon is set a tower containing administrative offices; a library;
workshops and storage; a cubic, top-lighted undivided volume for temporary displays; the
shedroofed, zinc-clad “clover-leaf” pavilion for the permanent collection; and the
entrance temple. The platform also covers museum spaces excavated into the hill, and
from it, one can descend gradually to curving terraces, furnished with sculpture, that
border the gardens of the former abbey; beneath a portion of the terraces are additional
exhibition areas.
Hollein has rejected the prescribed routes encountered in traditional museums for
mysterious, polymorphous paths that compel the viewer to wander on her own and
discover unexpected places, then to turn back on them or chance on new chambers.
Because chronology is not the issue it would be for a historically based collection, the ad
hoc character is stimulating rather than frustrating. Upstairs and downstairs, under- and
above-ground, the variously configured galleries illuminated by diverse means—daylight
through windows and skylights and artificial light via incandescent, neon, and fluorescent
fixtures—permit individual works to be perceived in the setting most sympathetic to their
makers’ intentions. The most organized part of the display areas comprises what Hollein
calls the “cloverleaf”—a group of seven “kissing squares,” to use Kahn’s formulation,
that are traversed at the corners. Set under saw-toothed skylights, these rooms are ideal
for big pieces by such artists as Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, and Roy
Lichtenstein. There are also curved rooms, some with undulating walls that are positively
Baroque in character; double-height spaces and circular steps add further drama.
Hollein’s rejection of the convention of amorphous flexible areas, dominant since the
1940s, in favor of a rich variety of specific and distinctive spaces, would in the 1990s
become a popular solution for art museums—yet another example of the way the
Museum Abteiberg adumbrates many later schemes for this type of institution.
Also prescient is Hollein’s interjection of playfulness and irony into the reverence that
typically pervades museum design. Although marble clads some of the surfaces, it is
combined with less elevated masonry materials like brick and sandstone. Reflective as
well as transparent glass appears; zinc is placed beside chromium and steel. One side of
the temple-like pavilion that forms the main entrance sports graffiti in red paint, matching
the color of some of the railings. Exterior light fixtures have an industrial character in
contrast to the lush surrounding landscape and the textured brick walls and paths. The
visitor, constantly encountering the unpredictable, is sensitized to the daring originality of
the art displayed.
It is instructive to compare Museum Abteiberg with another German museum from the
same period that similarly had a profound effect on subsequent museum design—James
Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie (1977–84) at Stuttgart. Both are set on irregular terrain and
require urbanistic interventions, but Stirling’s solution revives and updates the 19thcentury
museum paradigm, whereas Hollein has jettisoned all previous solutions. Both
make reference to industrial as well as classical buildings and use the technique of
compositional collage, yet their differences illuminate the manifold possibilities inherent
in the museum program.