Massive art-stack: Herzog & de Meuron's latest box of tricks on the outskirts of Basel

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004 by Rob Gregory

The Swiss it seems love boxes. Big ones, small ones, glass, stone: boxes as isolated objects, beautifully detailed externally with delightful internal spaces. Without formal convention or decorative motif indicating each box's given function, in the resolution of the object as a whole, silhouettes are often as reduced as their details; simple boxes to live in, work in, and play in, built to a quality consistent with the best of Swiss design; from the nation's much-admired graphics, to the laconic faces of their timeless Swiss railway watches--simple, unadorned but exquisite in execution. Now, on the fringes of Basel, the Swiss have a new box.

Within the context of its industrial estate location, Herzog & de Meuron's Schaulager is immediately conspicuous: no extraneous lean-to loading bays, no brash signage, and no cheap metal cladding. Instead, the building's rough (yet modulated) sandpaper-like skin--cast from on-site aggregate--has a surreal quality. Its siting too is equally arresting, not withdrawn and remote within an alienating car park, but set hard-up against the pavement, prioritizing pedestrians over lorries.

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Turning the corner, the face of the building is revealed; two animated eyes, an inset nose, and a low glazed grin. Like the folded flaps of a cardboard box, a crisp white re-entrant facade distorts with sharp angles containing an entrance court to guide visitors to a sunken entrance foyer.

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On entering the box, visitors are dwarfed by a vertiginous array of concrete balconies and an apparently endless constellation of fluorescent tubes. Recalling the vision-straining trickery of Andrea Gursky's photographs, eyes soon give up trying to resolve depth and perspective, flitting instead between foreground and infinity until they pause to blink. But hang on, isn't this just a warehouse? Why so much effort?

The answer lies in the content. Beyond having capacity to provide over 11 500sq m of flexible storage space over five floors, supported by 750sq m of carriage handling and 800sq m of administrative space, the building has a hidden cultural role. Without fear of overstatement, this particular Swiss box can claim to contain a new building type: part gallery, part warehouse, part education facility--Schaulager literally means display-warehouse; a place in which art is never consigned to crates or inaccessible racks, but where it is stored in carefully curated and densely arranged display cells, accessible to scholars and perhaps most significantly facilitating its sustained conservation.

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In its current configuration, lower ground and entrance levels are used as temporary exhibition spaces, with a cafe, bookshop, 144-seat auditorium, and two permanent art installations by Robert Gober and Katharina Fritsch. Above these, three levels of flexible modular space have been divided to contain specific collections of work. With touch-screen technology, each isolated cell can be activated, reducing unnecessary exposure to light when not being visited.

Herzog and de Meuron's attention to detail is evident throughout, with inset lighting tracks, playful dented handrails and graceful wall-mounted sliding doors that eliminate floor tracks allowing smooth level access throughout. While modest in its material composition--concrete, screed, plasterboard and (very little) glass--the building has been made with precision and consistency. However, in many ways we would expect nothing less from Herzog & de Meuron. More inspiring is the manipulation of space. As with the Laban Centre, the Schaulager demonstrates their commitment to the form of space, as well as the form of matter. Set against the rigour of the orthogonal storage areas, the foyer offers a dramatically dynamic sequence of entrance and circulation areas, as residual spaces between the angular white screen wall, balcony edges and staircase contort and taper, rise and fall.

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The building is exhilarating to visit, and if you're quick you may get there in time to see the architect's own exhibition which gives a rare insight into their working processes. No 250--An Exhibition by Herzog & de Meuron runs at Schaulager until 12 September.

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