P.188 Plans / P. 309 Images
No. 169 Schaulager
The Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation has agreed to make its works of art available to the Kunstmuseum Basel on permanent loan. The foundation, which was instrumental in enabling Europe’s first museum for contemporary art to open in 1980, nevertheless has a severe shortage of space—a situation further compounded by the enormous dimensions of much of today’s emerging art. And so, instead of building yet another museum, with all that that entails, in a city already blessed with many such institutions as a result of its longstanding humanist tradition, the idea of the Schaulager was born. It is an innovative new concept for storing art in a warehouse building equipped with all the conservationist, climatic and security technology of an art depot, but with the difference that the works are stored in a way that allows them to be viewed at any time upon request—without having to be unpacked, moved or subjected to changes of temperature or humidity. The only works to be allocated permanent rooms are the large-scale installations Rattenkönig by Katharina Fritsch and Untitled (1995-1997) by Robert Gober, neither of which can be transported without considerable logistical effort. As well as providing works on loan to museums and source material for academic researchers, the Schaulager itself aims to make lasting and high-profile contributions to the international art discourse. To this end, it organizes conferences and a major annual exhibition focusing on one or more important artists in the collection. Instead of a city-center venue, the Laurenz Foundation has commissioned a building on the outskirts of Basel—at the Münchenstein duty-free warehouse complex on the boundary between the cantons Basel Stadt and Basel Land. This complex is associated predominantly with trade and commerce and has hitherto had no connections with the world of art, apart from a handful of bonded-storage and forwarding facilities. The design by Herzog & de Meuron relates to the dual nature of this building project: the secure storage of art works on the one hand and, on the other, the semi-public character of the institution. Both of these factors have been developed on a site-specific basis. The polygonal building of shimmering brown concrete, its form determined by the perimeter at the front of the plot of land on which it is constructed, seems to grow out of the gravelly soil, which the architects have echoed visually in the roughcast surface of the facade. The unusually earthy look of the facade has been achieved by using a retarder that keeps the wall soft for an hour when stripping the formwork, so that loose particles can be chipped off. To prevent water ingress into the resulting crevices, which might cause cracking, the concrete has mica added to it to promote silting. The earthy walls on four of the building’s five sides function as a thermal mass that helps to regulate the interior climate. Above all, however, they lend the building the closed, heavy-duty appearance of a warehouse. The large volume, interrupted by only a few apertures, and with no outward indication of the positions of the interior floors and ceilings, has the commanding presence of a monolith amid the car ramps and logistics centers that surround it, opening up only towards the street and the tram stop. Visitors arriving here are welcomed by the grand gesture of a facade that sweeps inwards from the ground line in a trapezoidal shape spanning the full height of the building, creating three walls in brilliant white that look like enormous cinema screens, with monitors embedded on either side on which the institution can project images and videos externally. This indentation also creates a small public space that is accessed by stepping through a gatehouse. The scale of the gatehouse reflects the rows of housing on the other side of the street and the tramline, and forms part of a passageway that leads visitors from the peripheral urban world into the enclosed space of the Schaulager. The main entrance is integrated into a low-level ribbon of glass, above which the entrance facade, supported by only two pillars, seems to float. With this, the architects have added
a touch of fragility to an otherwise monumental structure, while at the same time introducing a paradoxical give-andtake between reality and illusion. For this seemingly floating wall is in fact a steel lattice construction that plays an important load-bearing role for much of the building. This visual confusion of spatial perception, together with the ambivalence generated by alternating gestures of opening and closing, continues inside the building. On entering, all is openness and broad expanse. The Schaulager rises to its full height of twenty-eight meters. The lower and ground floor levels provide a total area of 3360 sqm, which can be partitioned as required for temporary exhibitions. The lower level houses the two permanently installed works by Katharina Fritsch and Robert Gober. Above this publicly accessible area, three floors housing the works of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation jut into the room at right angles like huge shelves. They provide a total area of 7240 sqm fitted with niches that can be extended freely as required for the presentation of the works in the collection, arranged according to the materials used. Each niche has a sliding door and can be accessed only on request. Visitors with a valid interest in seeing the respective works are given a programmed key that opens only the doors to those works they have specifically requested. Museum guards are not required. Outside the warmth of the concrete facade exudes an air of biomorphic opulence, while the interior is distinctly sober. The colors are determined by the materials. The flooring on both exhibition levels consists of unfinished oak, as in Tate Modern in London. The ceilings, spanning more than eighteen meters, are thermally activated by heating loops, while the parapets of the warehouse levels, seen from below, are of exposed concrete, with neon tubes embedded in them to provide a pure white light that suffuses the corners of the rooms and the transitions between ceiling and walls in a way that dissipates all sense of spatial enclosure. This magical reduction is complemented by biomorphic details. The surface of the facade is reiterated throughout the building like a leitmotif. The steel panels cladding the entrance to the administrative wing and the truck delivery area borrow their undulating form directly from the rough surface of the concrete shell: a panel is pressed in the manner of a frottage and then scanned in to be used as the basis for milling the mold. Inside the building, this basic panel recurs in the wall cladding of the lecture auditorium, where purple seating creates a distinctive atmosphere. The two narrow ribbons of windows quote one of the iconic hallmarks of modernism, albeit in a cleverly refined variation using modular biomorphic shapes: they gnaw through the concrete of the facade like gaping cracks, forming their own landscapes of bars and waves. Technically, this was achieved, after much experimentation in plaster, through the photogrammetric scanning of a little copper cylinder, which was then digitally processed and transposed into polystyrene negative molds. The biomorphic modulations of the ceilings and walls in the lobby, reading area and cafe have all been generated from the data for the window apertures. Spherical lamps by Jasper Morrison have been pressed into the protuberances like sugar balls in cookie dough. What appears to be derived directly from the nonEuclidean forms of nature is actually produced by computer software and cutting-edge manufacturing processes. The clear-cut geometries and swelling biomorphic forms are different results of a single method in which it makes no fundamental difference whether an element is rightangled or has an irregular surface; the calculation may be more or less complex, but both are mass produced and assembled. From the reception area, the gaze is drawn through a large glass window to the delivery hall that runs directly behind it like a canal flowing through the building. Even those who come here only for an exhibition can sense the warehouse atmosphere.
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