Set on a plinth, the museum demarcates itself as a sacred space. The building is articulated around a longitudinal street dividing it into isolated spaces. The museum site is isolated between a road and an area of houses cutting it off from its urban context and separating it from the banks of the nearby lake.

Expanded museum
Our vertical proposal seeks to create interaction between the museum site and its immediate surroundings, between a building and a topography, each with their own histories, and provide a contemporary perspective radiating out over the city, the lake, the garden and the museum’s plinth. Our proposition is to conceive of a museum not as a recomposed, composite architecture but as a global entity whose components can draw mutual sustenance from their respective heritages. The multiple, fragmented viewpoints characteristic of the Cubist aesthetic are applied here within an architectural logic: the museum announces its presence to the city whilst enabling the landscape of the lake and the city, the spaces it seeks to embrace, to penetrate within its confines.

Flexible spaces
The vertical configuration, structured by the stacking and staggering of its component spaces provides an enormous possibility for modularity and flexibility:
When closed, these volumes become pure ‘white cubes’, the classic conceptual exhibition space. When staggered, they open up intermediate rest spaces between the exhibition rooms, bathed in natural light. Balconies looking out over the cityscape act as havens of rest, and become an integral part of the visitor’s itinerary through the museum.

The gardens complete this field of possibilities, providing a tactile universe and an alternative, exterior exhibition space as an extension of the museum visit. The diffuse landscape of the garden’s vegetation, provides a sensual experience within the museum, a living, natural environment.

Client: City of Hanover / Cost: € 12.5M excl. VAT / Surface: 4200 m² / Schedule: 2011 / Team: Bollinger-Grohmann (Structure), Franck Boutté (HEQ)