Burda Museum

Richard Meier – Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany, 2001-2004

The new museum for 20th and 21st century art was designed to blend into the lush landscape of the Lichtentaler Allee Park and, at the same time, to harmonize in scale with the classical profile of the adjacent Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. Great efforts were made to preserve as many trees as possible on the site, so that the Frieder Burda Museum would blend harmoniously into its natural surroundings.
The overall form and proportions of the new building correspond to the elevated plinth and entablature of the neoclassical Kunsthalle, but each institution retains its own tectonic identity.
The new three-story structure is accessed from a main portico facing east to the main path through the park. On the second floor a glass bridge connects the building to the Kunsthalle basement.
This bridge has been carefully detailed so as to intrude as little as possible on the character of the existing museum.
The Museum Frieder Burda is conceived as both an independent museum and a fraternal addition to the Kunsthalle. Therefore, the resulting building’s connection, a glass bridge, is like an umbilical cord that can be opened or closed. A lower-level outdoor courtyard embraces the building on its southern elevation, significantly enhancing the museum’s connection to the surrounding landscape.

Upon entry, visitors turn right through a spectacular atrium, the reception hall, to arrive at a spacious four-story transverse ramp aligned with the bridge that connects to the Kunsthalle one floor above. This primary means of vertical circulation, the ramp, together with an adjacent elevator, provides access to a second large gallery suspended above the ground-floor gallery as well as to auxiliary exhibition spaces in both the basement and mezzanine levels facing the entrance.
The great ramp is historically a feature in a continuous circulation sequence. But I prefer to think of this ramp as an event in itself, more of a picturesque and less sequential element in the spatial whole. I hope that visitors will experience circulation through the building as a succession of small bumps or jolts; movement through the building tends to be interrupted by arresting effects and counter-axis when the slope of the ramp ends at the entrances to the galleries
Light pours into the crisp white, glass-walled, rectilinear galleries, which are faced with sun screens. The main upper exhibition volume, accessed from the ramp hall via a bridge, allows views of the surrounding park and the lower level. The sunken floor plate of the upper gallery and the boundary walls of the lower gallery also allow natural light to penetrate to the lower level. Controlled natural light exists in most of the exhibition spaces, reflecting distinct ideas about how space affects the viewing of art.
The slits on the south facade help control the amount of light entering the gallery spaces during the day.
The changing time of day, the changing seasons of the year cause the daylight in the museum to illuminate the art in a way that can never be achieved by artificial light. Light is the key material that also pervades the interior spaces of the Museum.
This allows the visitor to see the artworks during the day in natural light, like the conditions in which most artists created them. The Museum Frieder Burda will be as conceptually and physically radiant as one hopes, as will the experience of being there.
Richard Meier