Museum of Modern Literature Marbach, Germany David Chipperfield

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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
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Page 6: A spare pavilion marked by a screen
Page 9 and 10: An exercise in rigorous restraint;
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Museum of Modern Literature Marbach, Germany David Chipperfield

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