Report: Refurbishment of and Addition to the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar
- Jakob Schoof
With a population of nearly 70,000, Colmar is the third largest city in Alsace. It is home not only to picturesque taverns and timber-framed structures, but also to one of the greatest treasures of the late middle ages. The Isenheim Altarpiece - which Matthias Grünewald painted exactly 500 years ago for a monastery of the Order of St. Anthony located just south of Colmar - has been on view since 1853 at the Unterlinden Museum. The refurbishment of and addition to the museum was completed in time for the jubilee. Herzog & de Meuron and their French partner architects DeA and Richard Duplat have carefully brought the Dominican convent up to contemporary standards - and, in the process, revealed layers of earlier periods. The plasterboard covering the dark beams has been removed, the church windows were refurbished, and a new wood floor was laid in the former convent church. The latter contains the altar. New wood doors grace the entrances, and there is new beaver-tail tiling on the roof. In addition to the refurbishment of the convent, the scope of the 44-million-euro project included the construction of two new buildings and the refurbishment of a former art nouveau swimming pool. These measures have nearly doubled the floor area accessible to the public: it is now 8000 m2. Above all the painting collection - which includes works by Monet, Dubuffet and Picasso - now has significantly more space. And there are two new halls for temporary exhibitions and events. Moreover, the citizens of Colmar have had a public space returned to them that had served as bus stop and parking lot. Place d'Unterlinden is now the heart of the museum complex; from here one also has access to the adjacent convent and the museum addition. The architects reinterpreted the convent complex in an attempt to instil tranquillity. The idiosyncratic brick pavilion with hip roof symbolises this quest. Its form and volume make reference to a mill that stood here centuries ago. Like a lantern hung from the eaves - but, in this case, on the ground - it supplies daylight to the underground passage connecting the museum to one of the additions. It has two windows, but no door. It is the public face of an otherwise hidden museum. Herzog & de Meuron used a similar symbol in 2003 at the entrance of the "Schaulager" in Basel. In both cases, a small structure draws attention to larger halls nearby that have the same palette of materials. In Colmar, the so-called "Ackerhof", a 3-storey structure, makes up the larger part of the newly built massing. The lower two levels accommodate the museum's department of modern art. The top floor, with a ceiling height of 11.5 metres, hosts temporary exhibitions. Its volume corresponds to that of the existing convent church. The facades are clad in hand-broken, small-format coring bricks: the raw edges are turned outward. The roof and the short end of the building are sheathed in standing-seam copper. These materials are new to the site, but harmonise with the convent's yellow and rust-red sandstone. The open spaces between the additions to the museum remind us that monasteries and convents are not only places of contemplation, but were also dedicated to self-sufficient existence. With this in mind, the architects created a courtyard enclosed by brick walls and containing an apple orchard: the "pomarium".
