Museum of Modern Literature Marbach, Germany David Chipperfield

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.