Outside Is Inside

You can hardly build a museum worse than the Kunsthaus Zürich, which was botched by David Chipperfield. The brutal façade of the stubborn box reminds me on the one hand of a fortress, and on the other of a cage in which the champagne-sipping art public is locked away - it is unclear whether this is to protect itself or to protect the public. A small sign (“Open”) next to the store desperately proclaims that, contrary to all impressions, the building is open and that, after passing through several heavy doors and a security guard, you can enjoy yourself - provided you pay an entrance fee of 31 francs.

Unseen art is not art

I found it all the more tragic the other day, sitting in the gray-cold foyer of the building, listening with one ear to an architectural tour in which the lecturer tried, with little credibility, to announce that the architect had wanted to make the museum inviting by extending the marble floor of the foyer out onto the forecourt. This gesture, which is both barely perceptible and certainly abstrusely expensive, shows once again that word has not yet gotten around in architectural offices about what museums should actually be: Places of mediation and experience that are open to a diverse public in order to facilitate dialog and education. They are not free-warehouse-like cellars in which art is locked away from the world. Because art that is not seen ceases to be art. It becomes a hollow totem of its actual idea.

I wonder why Switzerland is building one butt-ugly art bunker after another. The new Kunstmuseum Basel was just the beginning. Zurich followed suit and now the Kunstmuseum Bern also wants to build a soulless but defensible block in the event of war. The museum itself calls it “striking” on its website and promotes the building with a sterile architectural rendering. In this graphic, the “art experts” at Schmidlin Architekten have placed a Maman by Louise Bourgeois in front of the soulless building. Will Bern acquire this work as part of the new building? Probably the stock footage 3D models of Jeff Koon's balloon dogs were simply already sold out.

Nothing learned?

But they were already further along. Or at least pretended to be. When Rem Koolhaas' office OMA opened the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in 1992, a pedestrian path led through the building to give the passing public the feeling that they were already in the museum. The architectural shell was to become more of a membrane, allowing permeability. I can't say whether this was a successful concept. At least they didn't learn anything from it in Rotterdam. The last museum building they built there, the depot for the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam by MVRDV, is a reflective UFO that you wouldn't think could have an entrance at all.

So what about the other museums in the art and architecture city of Basel? In addition to the disastrous new Chris and Gantenbein building at the Kunstmuseum (about which I once heard a Daig lady say at a gallery opening: “Well, the next generation also wants something they can tear down"), this traditional institution has two other buildings. Firstly, there is the 1930s main building, to which the museum moved because the previous location (today's Natural History Museum, which is already sitting on packed suitcases to move into its very own concrete bunker building) offered too little fire protection.

Loveless Minecraft bunker

This Italian-style main building was deliberately designed to be uninviting. A small balcony has been cleverly placed on the hard front, encouraging people to look down on the mob from it. Once you have made it through the colonnade and past the ticket counter sphinxes sitting behind bulletproof glass, you will hopefully not be as emaciated as the citizens of Calais lamenting for eternity in the inner courtyard, even if your skin tone makes you look like one in the light of the Flavin work. The forecourt of the museum serves as a kind of art limbo: a place between worlds, not outside, not inside, not for a fee, not without effort.

The Kunstmuseum Gegenwart, which opened at the same time as the Kunsthal Rotterdam, exudes a brittle form of institutional openness that was popular in the 1990s. Although you are not allowed to stroll through this branch of the Kunstmuseum, at least a stream is allowed to inscribe itself into the museum architecture. One is almost grateful that the building reacts a little to its surroundings. Otherwise, the dominant impression is that a loveless eight-year-old designed the cement block in Minecraft and placed it in the landscape. The failure of the Kunstmuseum Gegenwart's accessibility is revealed when you try to open the four-metre-high glass door on your own.

Attract and swallow

In contrast, the architecture of the HeK in Münchenstein cleverly swallows you up. Disguised as a café, it lures visitors to its museum front desk with the smell of coffee. The museum acts almost like an angler fish with panini as a light source. If you just want to get out of the windbreak of the Freilagerplatz for a hot drink in the newly named ela eatery on the concrete gallery, you can put on your virtual reality goggles.

It's not far from the HeK to the Kunsthaus Baselland, which complements the cultural campus with the HGK and HeK. From the HeK forecourt, you can walk through a bright birch grove, which would have delighted Gustav Klimt, directly into the new Kunsthaus, which opens up beautifully towards Freilagerplatz thanks to its large glass façade. It becomes difficult when the public explicitly wants to enter the Kunsthaus and makes the mistake of finding an entrance from Helsinki-Strasse. A lot happens there architecturally with stairs and facades, but to find the entrance you have to be a little cold-blooded. It's actually nice that the Kunsthaus Baselland is demonstratively insisting on good neighborliness: if you want to come to us, you have to come to you (i.e. to the HeK).

In contrast, the Museum Tinguely, designed by the otherwise rather defensive (albeit mostly round) Mario Botta, appears quite open in a surprising way. The building gives the highway ramp the cold shoulder - including a combat tower - but anyone approaching the museum from Solitudepark will suddenly find themselves in its clutches, almost unnoticed. As a Roche water treatment plant is located beneath the Tinguely Museum, the weight of the building has to rest on gigantic external columns. This creates a rather open anteroom, in the shadow of which, looking through huge windows, you seem to be standing in the middle of Tinguely's greatest works. The park's fountain gurgles behind you and without even wanting to, you are already in the middle of it.

One Basel museum still seems important to me in my exterior-interior-transition architecture consideration. The Toy Worlds on Barfüsserplatz are known for their enormously elaborate, loving and lively window displays. These panoramic worlds, which are open to all, are often in dialog with the exhibitions presented in the museum. Inside and outside are childishly and playfully reversed here. Who is inside? Who is outside? Who is looking in and who is looking out? Does the Steinenvorstadt thus become part of the museum? Are aesthetic experience and mediating presentations bound to a place, an institution or a time? Doesn't the museum that enchants drunken passers-by at 3 a.m. win?

TL

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)