Museum of Modern Literature Marbach, Germany David Chipperfield

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Museum of Modern
Literature
Marbach, Germany
David Chipperfield
Architects

David Chipperfield’s haunting Museum of Modern Literature
in Marbach am Neckar, near Stuttgart, southern Germany,
is extraordinary for its reduction of architecture to the
barest essentials.
The museum houses and displays books, manuscripts and
artefacts from the extensive 20th century collection in the
Archive for German Literature – including the original
manuscripts of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and Alfred Doblin’s
‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’ – and sits in parkland, embedded
into a ridge overlooking the pretty valley of the Neckar River.
It stands like a modern Parthenon on its own small Acropolis,
stripped-to-the-bone-elegant, in stark relationship to the
National Schiller Museum, a near-Baroque pile from 1903,
and a contorted brutalist affair from 1973, of which it forms
a part. As with nearly all of Chipperfield’s architecture, this
work is an exercise in rigorous restraint: a classically-inspired,
minimalist temple of glass and slender concrete columns
atop a concrete plinth.
But what is more interesting, perhaps, is that Chipperfield
won the commission for the museum at all. That in a country
still plagued by memories of Nazi monumental classicism –
Hitler’s neo-Grecian House of German Culture, with its massive
stone columns, is not far away in Munich – and its ongoing
dilemma of how to achieve a suitable expression of
monumentality in its architecture, an architect, a foreign
one at that, would dare propose a neo-classical colonnaded
structure for a building of such national importance.
And won in open-competition, to boot!
Maybe it had to fall to an auslander, a foreigner, to convince
the jury that at this distance from the Second World War
an abstracted reduction of Nazi classicism might be okay to
contemplate. After all, a few other foreigners – James Stirling
with his Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart of 1984 and Norman
Foster and his renovation for the Reichstag in Berlin of 1999,
among them – had stamped their own peculiar imprimatur
on Germany’s post-war reconstruction.
Challenging an unwritten rule that post-war German buildings
should never have columns, Chipperfield nevertheless
entered the competition with his spare, rectilinear temple.
“We felt we were bringing back a sort of classicism that hadn’t
been seen in this part of Germany since the war,” he says.
“And the period was far enough away that the discussion
could be interesting. Germans are willing to analyze what
things mean. It’s a great climate to work in. I wanted to reduce
the architecture to its most simplified, almost primitive form”.
Still, mischievously, he had to reassure one concerned juror
that the slender pre-cast concrete columns weren’t fascist
columns at all but mullions!
Given the parkland site, Chipperfield came up with a scheme
for a temple on a podium, where the base, containing six
exhibition galleries, would be partially embedded into the
side of the hill, with entry provided via a glass and concrete
colonnaded pavilion on top.
Visitors enter the museum through this upper level lantern,
reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe’s entrance to the Berlin Art
Gallery, with its crystalline glass and steel pavilion atop a base.
Marbach is sparer, the pavilion marked by a screen of skinny
concrete columns, without capitals or bases, wrapped around
its four regular, symmetrical sides.
It sits ever so lightly, transparent-like, over the exhibition
galleries where the columns more frequently turn into
mullions for glass walls or pilasters set against solid panels.
Roof terraces, podium walls and parapets are formed of
stringently linear planks of sandblasted pre-cast concrete
with a limestone aggregate.

issue 09 National Museum of Modern Literature

Mindful of concerns about the columns and overt classical
symmetry of the scheme, Chipperfield and his project architect,
Alexander Schwartz, pared the columns until they became almost
impossibly thin, mere matchsticks, but still capable of being
pre-cast in concrete. They also played a subtle game of sorts with
the march of the columns: while on the upper lantern all elevations
share a single column where that turns a corner, on the lower
level the colonnades each stop a column-width short of the
sharp edge of the corner itself. Columns are also omitted where
they signal entrances. The greater challenge though, you suspect,
lay within the museum itself, where the books and manuscripts
were required to be housed in dimly lit (50 lux) spaces to
protect them from daylight. In order not to create a gloomy
or claustrophobic environment, Chipperfield tried to expand
the sense of enclosure with extra layers of outdoor terraces that
take advantage of the views across the landscape. “We wanted
these galleries to be dark in a positive way, not just dark boxes,
but rooms with architectural integrity,” he says.
Entering the museum, visitors find themselves in a large hall
where Ipe, a dark Brazilian wood, clads much of the walls. Daylight
bathes the limestone floors and in-situ concrete walls and soffits
in an ethereal glow. Museum goers then work their way down a
series of grand stairs in a carefully choreographed journey of axial
turns and views to prepare them for the dimly lit lower ground
galleries, subtly reducing light levels as they descend.
Once on the lowest level, a suite of exhibition spaces is arranged
around three anterooms. Rigidly contained in plan, space is
permitted to shift beneath the external terraces that rise and
fall. So, while unified by the consistent palette of in-situ concrete
soffits, warm timber walls and limestone floors, each space is
made unique through subtle shifts in ceiling height.
Since the main exhibition galleries, for permanent collections
and temporary exhibitions, were required to have close-control
environments, and as such starved of natural light, Chipperfield
designed these windowless rooms to adjoin a space that
is either a glazed loggia or illuminated by skylights to diminish
the sense of having descended into a tomb. The most spectacular
is the smallest room, a temporary exhibition hall, top-lit from
a soaring 11 metre high lantern.
At Marbach the language is modest, classical references are
refined to absolute minimum, the architecture one of exquisite
lightness. The Museum of Modern Literature was awarded the
2007 RIBA Stirling Prize. JR

A spare pavilion marked
by a screen of skinny concrete
columns, without capitals or
bases, wrapped around its four
symmetrical sides
issue 09 National Museum of Modern Literature

issue 09 National Museum of Modern Literature

An exercise in rigorous restraint;
a classically inspired, minimalist temple
of glass and slender concrete columns
atop a concrete plinth
West elevation
Project Statement
The museum is located in Marbach’s scenic park, on top
of a rock plateau overlooking the valley of the Neckar River.
As the birthplace of the dramatist Friedrich Schiller, the town’s
park already held the National Schiller Museum, built in
1903, and the Archive for German Literature, built in the 1970s.
Displaying artefacts from the extensive 20th century collection
from the Archive for German Literature, notably the original
manuscripts of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and Alfred Döblin’s
“Berlin Alexanderplatz”, the museum also provides panoramic
views across and over the distant landscape.
Embedded in the topography, the museum reveals different
elevations depending on the viewpoint. By utilising the steep
slope of the site, terraces allow for the creation of very different
characters: an intimate, shaded entrance on the brow of the
hill facing the National Schiller Museum with its forecourt and
park, and a grander, more open series of tiered spaces facing
the valley below. A pavilion-like volume is located on the highest
terrace, providing the entrance to the museum. The interiors
of the museum reveal themselves as one descends down through
the loggia, foyer and staircase spaces, preparing the visitor for
the dark timber-panelled exhibition galleries, illuminated only
by artificial light due to fragility and sensitivity of the works
on display. At the same time, each of these environmentally
controlled spaces borders onto a naturally lit gallery, balancing
views inward to the composed, internalized world of texts
and manuscripts with the green and scenic valley on the other
side of the glass.
A clearly defined material concept using solid materials (fair-
faced concrete, sandblasted reconstituted stone with limestone
aggregate, limestone, wood, felt and glass) gives the calm,
rational architectural language a sensual physical presence.
David Chipperfield Architects
Longitudinal section
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ground floor plan
lower ground floor plan
01 foyer/entrance area
02 auditorium
03 double-height lightwell
04 terraces
05 hall
06 exhibition spaces
07 temporary exhibition
08 loggias
09 wc
10 technical rooms
11 archive link

issue 09 National Museum of Modern Literature

The columns are impossibly thin,
mere matchsticks, but still capable
of being pre-cast in concrete

issue 09 Museum of Modern Literature
Project Museum of Modern Literature
Location Marbach am Neckar, Germany
Architect David Chipperfield Architects,
Design/Project Architect Alexander Schwartz
Project team Harald Muller, Martina Betzold,
Andrea Hartmann, Christian Helfrich, Franziska Rusch,
Tobias Stiller, Vincent Taupitz, Mirjam von Busch,
Laura Fogarasi, Barbara Koller, Hannah Jonas
Site supervision Wenzel + Wenzel
Project manager Drees + Sommer
Structural engineer Ingenieurgruppe Bauen,
Services engineer Jaeger, Mornhinweg + Partner
Ingenieurgesellschaft, Stuttgart;
Ibb Burrer + Deuring Ingenieurburo Gmbh, Ludwigsburg
Photographer Christian Richters
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