Arts & Culture \ The Brandhorst Gallery, Munich

Invited competition. Unbuilt. 

We were invited to be on the shortlist for this invited competition in 2003.

The architecture of galleries for changing exhibitions can be controversial. Curators will always tend towards gallery neutrality - four white walls and diffuse top light and the maximum of flexibility. Although an understandable approach, the practice’s attitude is to try to make a memorable space in itself and to then facilitate many different variations within it. Our unrealised ideas for Poltimore House developed the concept of changeable sliding walls, and in an invited competition in Munich this idea became a major element of the design. The project sat on the edge of a museum park alongside the Alte Pinakothek Gallery which, after the war, had been cleverly rescued, but not restored, by German architect, Dollgast, so that the bomb damage remained evident. Internally, he developed a stunning symmetrical arrangement of two cascade staircases which instantly sets up an obvious circulation diagram.

The submitted design adopted the same idea and would have created a another chasm of top-lit space through the length of the proposed rectangular planned building. This space would have extended out as upper lookouts in the parkland landscape at either end. Galleries consisted of three storeys of connected rooms between the staircase space and the facade. The symmetrically arranged staircases would have set up a natural museum circulation. Beneath them was a secondary fire escape stair.

The elevation would have been made of sliding panels both glazed and solid, the solid sliding elements clad externally in copper so that the variations in the galleries on the interior from one show to another would have been reflected in a constantly changing exterior facade.

The galleries would have been lit from the kinetic facade and from the top-lit staircase with the top floor galleries also having top light. On the other side of the stair-chasm were the gallery cafe and a special cantilevered top-lit gallery where Cy Twombly’s 12 painting collection The Battle of Lepanto was to have been displayed.