Herzog & de Meuron

Goetz Gallery . Munich

Herzog & de Meuron . photos: © radu malasincu

The gallery is a freestanding volume situated within a park-like garden of birches and conifers between the street and a house from the 1960s. Thus the building can be used both as a public as well as a purely private gallery; a role that is to be settled in the future. The building's architectural conception corresponds to the character of the works that the collector has brought together over the last 30 years, embracing the art of the 1960s to today: Nauman, Ryman, Twombly, Kounellis, Federle, Rückriem and others.

A timber configuration rests on a reinforced-concrete base of the same dimension that is half buried so that only its upper glazed perimeter is visible from the outside. A similar matt glass strip surrounds the timber volume at the uppermost section, admitting diffuse glare-free daylight from a height of 4 meters into the exhibition spaces. The walls within the exhibition spaces are between 4 and 5.5 meters high.
Two reinforced-concrete tubes are set laterally between the lower and upper galleries. The larger of the two serves as the office and reception. Depending on the daylight conditions and the point of view of the observer, the gallery appears either as a closed, flush volume consisting of related materials (birch plywood, matt glass, untreated aluminum) or as a wooden box, resting on two trowels in the garden.
Herzog & de Meuron, 1996

Goetz Collection, Gallery for a Private Collection of Modern Art
Munich, Germany
Project 1989-1990, realization 1991-1992
Herzog & de Meuron Team:
Partners: Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron
Project Team: Mario Meier
Planning:
Associate Architects: J.P. Meier-Scupin, Munich
Gallery Space Conception: Helmut Federle