Museum of Modern Literature Marbach, Germany David Chipperfield

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