Ungers in Hamburg - Oswald Ungers' design

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1996 by Layla Dawson

Hamburg's new Gallery of Contemporary Art, designed as an extension to Hermann von der Hude and Georg Theador Schirrmacher's original 1868 terracotta tiled museum and Albert Erbe's 1919 Wilhelminian extension, was handed over to the client in August. Oswald M. Ungers' four-storey cube sits on a 100 x 70 m podium with angled sides, a white temple of Western culture standing on a truncated pyramid, intended to symbolise the victory of rationality and enlightenment over the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Sumer. Around the podium clad in Swedish red granite, Ian Hamilton Finlay has carved a quotation from Saint Juste, `Heimat ist nicht das Land, sie ist Gemeinschaft der Gefuhle'. (Home is not the land but the feelings people have in common.) However, Ungers' design and rationale has been criticised for colonial overtones in a city that prides itself on an international and liberal outlook. The open expanse of podium has been likened by some to a military parade ground and the steep sides of the acropolis, which raise the building above the public at street level, have prompted inevitable comparisons with fortifications.

The problem with Ungers' minimalism, based on his obsession with the square as the measure of all space and volume, is that on a large scale, modesty can be transformed into an overwhelming gesture of power. The positioning of the building provides a visually very decisive punctuation mark at the end of a row of exhibition buildings, called collectively Hamburg's "Kunstinsel" or art island, bounded by busy roads and railway lines. Other buildings on this traffic island include the main railway station sandwiched between the Kunsthalle and three other city subsidised galleries for temporary exhibitions housed in former market halls.

Despite debate over the building's external appearance, it does provide good conditions for hanging, displaying and viewing art. The podium accommodates much needed additional storage rooms for the Kunsthalle, artificially lit exhibition spaces, administration offices, a basement garage, and a connecting corridor with a waterfall arrangement of stairs leading from the existing Kunsthalle down into the basement of Ungers' cube. Here a permanent installation by Richard Serra, liquid lead thrown against the wall and on to the floor in heaped lines, is destined to be forever part of the building.

The top of the podium, as well as providing the base for Ungers' cube, is a visual link between old and new buildings. From the new gallery side of the plaza, the decorative arches, niches and reliefs of the existing nineteenth-century facade are set off to advantage. This elevation was the original grand entrance to the museum, with an elegant curved drive for carriages around a statue of Schiller facing out over the Alster lake. Ungers' creamy Portuguese limestone cube now has its own separate entrance off the podium leading into the ground floor foyer, with bookshop, cafe, and media room.

The three exhibition floors above are reached by a helical staircase which ensures that visitors arrive at the same point on every level and, after going round the floor, leave from there. Windows in the staircase look into the glass-roofed open core of the cube and the interior is made more lively by changing light effects, the result of outside weather conditions, in this four-storey atrium. The 5600 [m.sup.2] of exhibition space can be easily subdivided as needs demand. Exhibits to be permanently housed in the new building will include paintings, sculpture and installation already owned by Hamburg and collections on long term loan to the city covering the major art movements of America and Europe since the '60s. The public opening is planned for February 1997.