Interview
The three best-known Kuehn Malvezzi projects are conversions of former industrial buildings into exhibition rooms for contemporary art. Do old warehouses make better museums?
The idea of warehouses as lofts come from artists’ studios, a free, simple, universal space. Exhibition rooms for art have always been influenced by the rooms in which it was produced, which is why it is more natural for contemporary art to be exhibited in an industrial hall than in a museum.
What sort of space does today’s art need?
There is no such thing as the ideal room. In my opinion it has to be as close as possible to what the work is based on. Harking back to the theme again: In the early 20th century we had top-lit artists’ studios, and as a consequence we now have the first galleries functioning in the same way. Nowadays art is produced in the most office-like conditions. Not only media art, for installations and sculptures as well concepts and templates are devised on computers and then implemented. So to be radical one really ought to say: Today’s art ought to be exhibited in office-like conditions. People are longing more and more for triviality and the normality of an office, the heroics of an industrial building are no longer that interesting.
Your exhibition rooms are for the most part characterless, «still» rooms that withdraw entirely behind the exhibits. There are very few places left for you to articulate yourselves as architects. In the Rieckhallen it is the gangway from Hamburger Bahnhof, at the “documenta” it was the corridors with an ever recurring bench element. Is that what is left for “architecture” in your concept?
Yes, but in my view that is not negative. For me these are the fundamental tasks of architecture: Motion in a space, the creation of routes and the narrative aspect of series of rooms. And these things develop in an exhibition room with demonstrative precision, a dramaturgy. If I do not think of an exhibition in the context of its day, it runs the risk for me of degenerating into a sort of trade fair, with stands lined up one after the other vying for
attention. An exhibition is not conceived as a competition but as an instance of dialog between two various events. From our point of view the experience of time in the room is the basic prerequisite of all architecture, be it a school, a hospital or an exhibition. That is not a little but a great deal, because an exhibition is the spatial model par excellence.
But a building not only has an inside but an outside as well and serves some sort of representative function. The conversion for the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection was described as «modest» and «cheap» – and is the museum that houses one of the richest art collectors of our time. Is it not a capital contradiction?
In an exhibition room or art marble is a disturbance, bronze is a disturbance, the entire architectural up-grading scenario is a disturbance.For art I need spaces, spatial clarity, and I do not achieve that with materials. I know enough artists who do not like exhibiting in the boom museums of the 1980s and 1990s because it is extremely difficult to enter into dialog with spaces such as these. They have a unique form of dominance and representational affectations. I do not think that representation is a particularly favorable precondition for art. It is always better to try and create the most direct from of presentation. With no mediation! All form of mediation by means of representative techniques creates distance and a museum atmosphere in the sense of the killing off of art.
In an exhibition room or art marble is a disturbance, bronze is a disturbance, the entire architectural up-grading scenario is a disturbance.For art I need spaces, spatial clarity, and I do not achieve that with materials. I know enough artists who do not like exhibiting in the boom museums of the 1980s and 1990s because it is extremely difficult to enter into dialog with spaces such as these. They have a unique form of dominance and representational affectations. I do not think that representation is a particularly favorable precondition for art. It is always better to try and create the most direct from of presentation. With no mediation! All form of mediation by means of representative techniques creates distance and a museum atmosphere in the sense of the killing off of art.
A profiled sheeting facade also represents something.
It makes a statement, but not a rhetoric, primarily representative statement. It says: We want to achieve something with the least possible effort. That is something that plays an important role in conceptual art: The directness of the statement. In art I get nowhere with rhetoric, only with direct conceptual steps. Conceptual art is a role model for the precise use of means and for «autonomous shape» not meaning being expressive. An autonomous shape can also be an extremely calm, almost invisible shape. You can learn that from Donald Judd, and you can also learn it from the architects Alison and Peter Smithson: Directness of means and freedom from rhetoric.
That would infer that there is no longer any difference between the sublime cultural space of a museums and commercial gallery space.
Exactly. The difference between a museum, a gallery, production space and in fact an archive as well has become totally unclear. Thank goodness. You can swap the spaces with each other, which is why several museums now have their «project spaces» and operate in places that are not museum-like and there are also artists who install their studio in museums.
When it becomes interesting is when the living quarters, the private sphere are included, like here in the Stoschek Collection.
The visible storage area in Basle represents another blending of the spheres. The position of your exhibition spaces was compared with those of Herzog & de Meuron, was referred to as «modest minimalism». Your projects are characterized by a sort of rationalism, an interest in typologies, a desire for long spaces and volumes, as well as a desire for concealing. How would you describe your architectural interests?
The notion of coming up with a strong model, a strong type, which one then applies to a concrete situation it initially has nothing to do with – that is the basic idea behind all our interventions. Nothing emerges of its own accord, organically, from the situation. One always turns up with an idea in one’s head, with specific preconceptions, so we introduce the following idea: A labyrinth. Or a race course. We always start out from a strong preconception. It is almost certainly based on Ungers’ method of thinking and designing in images and preconceptions. But then it is also a case of inspecting the situation on site, drawing conclusions from it, trying to understand what it means and asking: How does the situation cope with this pure model? The typology encounters the desire for the pragmatic, unique, situational, even totally non-programmed, something that emerges when people come together, like an off-the-cuff conversation. For many people that is a contradiction: Rationalists are not situational and anyone who thinks organically has an aversion towards clear shapes. Our approach is to network these systems, put up with the contradictions and develop the design from precisely that.
You dare this balancing act, and in Berlin of all places, where the two poles you described form seemingly irreconcilable fronts. Is this an indication that what you have created elsewhere was completed under a wide variety of influences? For example in Milan and Vienna.
It is true that we are very much influenced by Milanese rationalism, but also by architecture in Portugal, where we also studied, by the Porto school, but primarily by Alvaro Siza. Of course there it was to do with contextualization, but also at all times with a social model, participation.
The Portuguese were very open to Italian rationalism and turned it into something organic. For us that was formative. And Vienna was too. I worked with Adolf Krischanitz – also someone who knows how to produce architecture from conceptualizing questions and not from preferences. And I hold Hermann Czech in very high esteem, as he repeatedly manages to create conceptual mannerisms.
Hermann Czech – much to his dislike – is treated as a guesthouse architect. Of this he once said: «You cannot be too good in any one field, otherwise it is not regarded as a concept but a trade». Kuehn Malvezzi are regarded as architects of the art scene. Does that give you stomach ache?
No, the hospitality business would give me greater stomach ache! No but seriously: We do not want to be treated as pure exhibition architects and are not. We have designed a school, we are currently designing a hotel, and we have designed several residential buildings. The topics we research are the same.
In other words you do not market yourselves specifically as architects for the art scene?
Every project has proved to be advertising for us, in particular, of course, the exhibition spaces, as the public perception is very big there. We do not do PR work in the traditional sense. I would not say that as a studio we specialize in exhibitions. What I would say is that as a studio we are interested in exhibitions. We are also interested in exhibiting as a model case for space.
How does a tension emerge from an object and a context that turns it into a work of art? Because it is not the object or the space itself that makes it a work of art, but precisely this tension. If you only deal investor or politicians who commission things in line with their own calculating you do not come up with such interesting ideas. For us working with artists, curators, and collectors is very profitable.
What do artists, curators and collectors rate about your work?
We are collectors ourselves and are knowledgeable about art, are friends with artists, live in this environment. It goes without saying that this is expressed in the architecture and is understood by artists and collectors. I can well imagine that it is reassuring for collectors if the person opposite speaks their language. Architects often see art differently. That is quite natural. Architects do not have a problem making a shadow gap with a ventilation slit between the floor and the wall. You can see this in 1980s museums almost everywhere. For the curator and the artist it is preposterous for the wall to hover a few centimeters above the floor and the floor to go off somewhere. For those who work in art, the wall and the floor have to meet, a spatial edge has to be formed. How otherwise can I exhibit a fatty corner? How otherwise can I create the feeling that a picture is hanging on a wall, the wall stands on the floor, and I am standing on the floor?
In addition to your conversions for art you have also designed new buildings: Single-family dwellings in Freiburg, Tübingen and Vienna, and a school in Vienna. These buildings speak a related language. Do you allow people to assume what a new museum by Kuehn Malvezzi would look like?
I do not think you can simply deduce one thing from the other. However, what interests us is the corporeality: a strong edifice and a strong corpus shape. Straight forward geometry, self-contained surfaces, few seams, a lack of «details» too, no visible connections – «a desire for concealing » you just called it, not making everything transparent, but like making a good suit, in which their can be a beautiful body that though you suspect is there you do not immediately see. And a series of rooms, which unfolds through the motion. These are the qualities a new museum building must have.
Interview: Axel Simon
Axel Simon, who was born in 1966, writes about architecture in the international specialist and popular press. He lives with his wife and two sons in Zurich.
www.architekturtexte.ch
project management: Andrea Nakath
