core.form-ula

Peter Zumthor’s remarkable museum of modern art in Cologne meshes ancient and modern to create a timeless and evocative building.

‘The largest heap of rubble in the world,” is how the German architect Rudolf Schwarz described Cologne in 1945. Over the course of 262 bombing raids, 78% of the city and almost 95% of its historic centre had been destroyed. After the war, Schwarz was handed the job of drawing up the reconstruction plan. His Stadlandschaften (“city landscape”) scheme laid down a network of new infrastructure and associated green spaces but, where possible, called for the medieval street pattern to be re-established.

While much that has been built here over the past 60 years is underwhelming, this critical decision has ensured that modern Cologne is a good deal more urban in character than other heavily reconstructed cities such as Coventry in the UK. Schwarz’s plan also allowed for the reconstruction of many of its medieval monuments.

Soon, architects of the Cologne school — figures such as Karl Band, Hans Schilling and Emil Steffann — had established a worldwide reputation for their inventive remodelling of the city’s ruined heritage. St Kolumba was one of two particularly badly damaged parish churches that were transformed into memorial gardens during the fifties.

The architect Gottfried Böhm built a small octagonal chapel on the site to house a statue of the Madonna which had miraculously survived the bombing, but otherwise the ruined church — comprising a late romanesque core, remodelled in the late gothic period — was left essentially as found.

In the early seventies, an archaeological dig revealed finds dating back to the Roman and Merovingian periods. This discovery necessitated the introduction of a protective roof that significantly diminished the dignity of the site — a situation further exacerbated by the crop of mediocre commercial developments that sprang up around it.

It was in this context that the Archdiocese of Cologne conceived the idea of constructing a new museum for its collection of religious art which would accommodate the ruins within its volume. Following a competition in 1997, Peter Zumthor was awarded the commission.

Weight of expectation

By that point, Zumthor’s generation of Swiss architects had dramatically influenced the global architectural discourse, shunting it away from its long-held preoccupation with signage and symbolism towards a renewed interest in the communicative potential of construction. While the invention with which this group’s work was conceived and the precision with which it was fabricated were rarely less than astounding, Zumthor’s achievements represented a particularly intimidating benchmark. By the time of the completion of his thermal baths at Vals in 1996 and the Kunsthaus in Bregenz a year later, his mastery of the art of building was without rival.

“By the time his thermal baths at Vals were finished, Zumthor’s mastery of the art of building was unrivalled”

Clearly, so exacting an architect was never going to enjoy the most prolific of careers, but the opportunities afforded him over the past decade have nonetheless disappointed in their scarcity. He has built a number of houses and the diminutive Bruder Klaus chapel, but his only other large commission, the Topography of Terror museum on the former site of Berlin’s Gestapo headquarters, was outrageously terminated mid-construction after financial support was withdrawn. A huge weight of expectation has therefore accrued to the Cologne project.

The 4,500sq m building, which opened last Friday, comprises two wings: one following the footprint of the former church, the other replacing a Franciscan monastery from the fifties. This broadly

L-shaped configuration offers a hard edge to the street and frames a courtyard on the site of the church’s former graveyard. The building is faced in a single material — a light grey brick specially developed for the project by Danish company Petersen. Fired using charcoal rather than the more conventional gas, it demonstrates a high level of colour variation but the mid-tone comes close to the colour of the mortar. An equivalence between brick and mortar is further suggested by their proportions. The brick is only 36mm high and of varying lengths of up to 520mm, while each mortar course is unusually thick, being exactly half the height of a brick. The resultant play between the massiveness of the construction and the fineness of its surface texture is also a characteristic of the thermal baths at Vals, but here the effect is altogether less brooding — coming closer in character to a length of fabric or the limpid surfaces of one of the Agnes Martin paintings that feature among Kolumba’s holdings.

Uninsulated and 600mm thick, the walls carry the weight of the building, in places bearing directly on what remains of the walls of the old church. However, an impression of lightness is maintained by Zumthor’s consistent suppression of their load-bearing function. The detailing of the windows is particularly significant in this respect. Largely restricted to the second floor — on the street elevations, entirely so — these are of an extraordinary scale. And yet Zumthor declines to express the structural effort of bridging over these huge openings, even setting the windows proud of the wall so as to disguise its considerable thickness.

The decision to deny the building’s weight has also guided the design of one of its most remarkable features. Directly above its junction with the ruined fabric, Zumthor’s wall magically dissolves into a swarm of tiny perforations which provide daylight to the cavernous interior that encompasses the remains of the old church. In its formal effect, this device might be compared to the Corinthian column that appears to bear huge loads on nothing more substantial than a cluster of acanthus leaves. That analogy is given force by the line of trees that have been planted around the building’s perimeter. Once they have matured, the foliage will cast fleeting shadows on the band of perforations, animating the light within and rendering its external reading still more evanescent.

Vast expanse of masonry

The architect clearly values the church-like image that is established by setting the windows high above a vast expanse of masonry. The band of perforations serves this ambition well: admitting light to the lower levels, while maintaining the necessary blank facade. The only street-level openings are therefore two entrances, one leading to the museum, the other to the Böhm chapel which Zumthor’s building engulfs.

The chapel sits on the site’s most prominent corner, where the church’s spire previously stood and where the new building’s craggy roofline rises to its highest point. Zumthor has provided it with a new porch let into the body of his building. Passing in, we find the door to the chapel ahead of us but also an opening to our right through which we can view, but not enter, the ruins. The chapel itself is a real oddity in reclaimed stone and in situ concrete, its imagery a heady mix of quasi-gothic and sci-fi. On architectural grounds there was perhaps little reason to preserve it, but its presence contributes to the richly palimpsest character of the site.

“The wall magically dissolves into a swarm of tiny perforations to bring daylight into the interior”

The door to the museum is easily located within a brief stretch of glazing but, as we enter, the way forward is immediately locked by the principal staircase which runs lateral to our approach. Navigating around it, we are first presented with the reception desk and then double back into the foyer which addresses the courtyard through another stretch of full-height glazing. Surfaced in gravel and populated by trees, this space is enclosed by a rugged concrete boundary wall, constructed in the same manner as the walls of the Bruder Klaus chapel. The device effectively establishes the courtyard’s dislocation from the wider city while also obscuring views of the low-level glazing from without.

Evocative atmosphere

At the end of the foyer, leather curtains give onto the room that encloses the ruins. This space is an epic 12m high so as to fully enclose the octagonal volume of Böhm’s chapel. Conical hanging lights offer focused points of illumination but the continuous band of perforations at high level is the principal light source. The space is really very dark but the dappled rays admitted through the outer skin create a fantastically evocative atmosphere.

With no glazing behind the perforated brickwork, the noise of the city is clearly audible but as with so many of Zumthor’s most memorable interiors, this room seems almost to exist out of time. Our passage across the excavations is by way of a timber deck that zigzags violently towards the far corner. As we progress, we weave between concrete columns — each precisely located to cause minimum damage — and eventually arrive at a small enclosure formed exclusively by the fabric of the old church and open to the sky. Here, Richard Serra’s sculpture The Drowned and The Saved is shown to wonderful effect.

Returning to the foyer, we begin our ascent to the two floors of exhibition space. The path of the stair picks up the circular motion that characterises the entrance sequence and which proves to be the central motive of the upper-level layouts. On each level, the plan is conceived as a loose constellation of freestanding boxes, which the circulation space flows between. As it does, it widens and contracts, in some places serving as just a route, in others offering the possibility of occupation.

It is a sensibility familiar from a number of projects produced by Swiss architects in recent years: Gigon & Guyer’s Kirchner Museum in Davos; Valerio Olgiati’s school at Paspels; and Zumthor’s own thermal baths at Vals. The plans of these buildings resemble street patterns in microcosm, their circulation spaces relating to the boxes much as a network of streets and squares relates to the houses that line it. In the Cologne building, the “street” is surfaced in white terrazzo, while the floors of the “houses” are set incrementally higher and laid in power-floated concrete.

The museum’s curatorial policy is unique. In every room, work from the middle ages is shown side by side with contemporary art — the notional point of connection being a shared commitment to spiritual values. A pointed absence of labels encourages us to approach each work without prejudice.

The first floor comprises black box spaces, but the level above is generously day-lit from the side. The viewing conditions are ultimately not so very far removed from those in which the medieval works would have first been experienced. The rooftop views come as a relief after the relentless interiority of the lower levels, and the curators have employed them to canny effect. The juxtaposition of one of Josef Albers’ most incandescent abstracts with the view out to Cologne Cathedral is particularly memorable.

On the second floor, the “street” eventually widens out into a “yard”, ranged about by three freestanding volumes. Each comprises two galleries, laid out enfilade and of successively increasing height. The first is a black box space, while the second is lit by a clerestory, which in all but one case is unsupplemented by artificial light. Here, confronted by works of art made eight centuries apart, we again find ourselves seemingly taken out of the present moment. At such points, it is hard to believe the archdiocese could have found an architect better equipped to support its unique mission. What Peter Zumthor has created at Cologne is a building that truly transcends its time. By Ellis Woodman via bdonline.co.uk

INSERT_MAP

Popularity: 69% [?]