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The Architecture Architects: Ortner & Ortner Copy: Friedrich Achleitner The bright, imposing building housing the LEOPOLD MUSEUM, which almost looks as if it is floating, is the only building in the Museum Quarter that follows the orthogonal arrangement of the former Hofmuseen (Court Museums) and thus links into the axis of Semper and Hasenauer’s Kaiserforum. This imperial slant is put into perspective in the courtyard of the Museum Quarter, and is, indeed, almost perceived as an anomaly, because the courtyard is dominated by the quadrangle of the former stables built by Fischer von Erlach. The latter is at a slight angle to the axis of the Kaiserforum and, much to the surprise of the Viennese, will be transformed into the biggest enclosed square in the city. When one also bears in mind the fact that the Museum of Modern Art follows the line of the buildings in Vienna’s 7th district, the directions and relationships are perfectly put into perspective, and are thus fully in keeping with Ortner’s interpretation of architecture and space. This interplay of counterbalancing focal points and dominances, contrasts and ambivalences, is continued in the building itself, although, according to the architects, the apparent randomness of the building’s openings and outlooks was strongly influenced by Rudolf Leopold. Built partly below ground level as a result of political and media pressure, the voluminous building could almost be said to house two museums, one above the other. The part of the building above ground level, which is entirely dedicated to the LEOPOLD COLLECTION and such facilities as the shop and the café, and which has an atrium lit from above, is the visible element in the ensemble formed by the Museum Quarter. The three lower floors will mainly be used for the graphics collection, temporary exhibitions, communication (the auditorium) and storage. The floor plan of the building is reminiscent of the layout of the sails on a windmill – in other words, the rectangular galleries form a circle round the middle of the „atria“, which extend over two floors and three floors respectively. This layout offers a certain direction of movement, although only the upper basement and the 1st and 2nd floors provide access all the way round. The apparently simple arrangement is made up of two alternating room sizes based on a unit measuring approximately 8.4 x 13.2 metres. This basic cell is doubled along the length of the building, thus creating galleries of roughly the same length (26.4m and 25.2m) but of very different depths (8.4m and 13.2m). Visitors enter at the „high atrium“ level, and can either take the single-flight staircase located behind the wall to the right, or enter the Klimtsaal (Klimt gallery), the first large gallery on the left. The top of the main stairs overlooks another big gallery which is in fact accessed on a lower floor and is part of the temporary exhibition area. The staggered heights of these galleries create a mezzanine which houses the museum shop, which in turn leads up to the café above the entrance hall. The functional „confusion“ of the spatial order in the entrance area is presumably not an artistic principle but a response to a simple need, one which has been translated into an instrument of spatial perception throughout the entire museum. It is on the next floor that the whole concept of the sequence of interleading rooms becomes clear, both in terms of the simplicity of the arrangement and the variations in the repeated basic configuration. The situation on-site - the straitjacket of the large, urban design of the stables - only permitted a compact multi-storey museum building big enough to house a historic collection consisting almost entirely of pictures. The ophthalmologist Dr. Rudolf Leopold stipulated, moreover, a maximum amount of daylight, so that right from the start it was only possible to use "mixed forms" - a challenge for the architect to try to make the very best out of every situation. The building is fundamentally different from the manifestations and „orthodox“ creations of the modern museum landscape, whether we are talking about clinically-lit exhibition areas (Bern) or the auratic transformation of daylight (Bregenz), rooms ideally lit by daylight (Klosterneuburg) or light effects created more for architectural purposes (Bilbao and many others), or simply radical doses of daylight (Stockholm, Basle etc.). The depth of the building only allows daylight to penetrate at specific points along the length of the rooms (with side light along the breadth) and only allows one-sixth of the exhibition area to be lit by daylight from above. Thus the few very deliberately positioned picture windows create the kind of randomness found in „bourgeois“ living situations, facing different directions and with different outlooks, which indeed are also consistent with the pictures which were painted for a certain stratum of society. The Ortners would not be the Ortners if they had not made a virtue out of the conditions on-site and the collection. The compact circular groups of galleries on the various floors do not exactly make it easy to find one’s way around the building. The main single-flight staircase down the length of the atrium and the above-mentioned picture windows with their very varied, noteworthy views of the Museum Quarter provide some points of reference. Thus, the building is „anchored“ from the inside out and, regardless of the presence of the pictures and the associated characteristics of the rooms, forms a kind of superior, stable and natural order. Prof. Dr. techn. Friedrich Achleitner, doyen of Austrian architectural criticism, author and exponent of concrete poetry and a member of the „Wiener Gruppe“, professor of architectural history at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, and author of a multi-volume guide to architecture entitled Österreichische Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert (Austrian Architecture in the 20th century). www.ortner.at |
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