With the Musée cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne and the Tanzhaus in Zurich, the Spanish firm Barozzi Veiga has completed two new buildings. Here we present the Musée cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne.
With the Musée cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne and the Tanzhaus in Zurich, the Spanish firm Barozzi Veiga has completed two new buildings. This brings the Barcelona-based firm’s total number of prestigious projects in Switzerland to three. Here we present the Musée cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne.
A few years ago, an imposing engine shed stood along the Lausanne railroad line, with a towering central nave to which two side wings with shed roofs were attached. Aerial photographs showed a majestic building, but it was not in good condition and was hardly used. For this reason, the city of Lausanne decided to demolish the engine shed next to the main railway station and use the opportunity for an ambitious cultural project. In 2011, the international competition for the Musée cantonale des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA) was launched, in which the international architectural team of Nieto Sobejano, Kengo Kuma, Caruso St John, Bernard Tschumi, Souto de Moura and the Swiss architects EM2N and Gigon + Guyer took part. The Barcelona-based team from Barozzi Veiga was awarded the contract. For the Italian Fabrizio Barozzi and the Galician Alberto Veiga, this was the third Swiss coup in quick succession, following the extension to the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur and the Zurich Tanzhaus.
Now, however, the Olympic city of Lausanne does not want to settle for a museum of contemporary art for the canton of Vaud. Bernard Fibicher, director of the new Musée cantonale, confidently announced that they wanted to aim higher and catch up with the international art centers. This is why two new cultural institutions are to be added to the vacated Plateforme 10 railroad site as early as next year: the Musée de l’Elysée (Museum of Photography) and the MUDAC (Museum of Design and Applied Arts), both of which will be housed in one building. The Portuguese firm Aires Mateus is currently constructing the new museum building at the head of the site, whose wide façade slits will regulate the flow of visitors as well as the supply of light.
A nod to the past
Unlike Aires Mateus, Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga did not want to erase all memory of the site’s original purpose. The south-facing part of the central nave with its arched windows was saved and integrated into the museum foyer. This is a stroke of luck for the new museum building, as the foyer – which on the first floor provides access to the bookshop, restaurant, auditorium, an experimental “espace projet” and a collection-related “espace dossier” – is the closest you can get to the industrial charm of the previous building. In contrast to most of the other competition designs, Barozzi Veiga did not rely on a formal proximity to the locomotive shed, but merely on symbolic and emotional references.
In contrast to Aires Mateus, the architects did not opt for a bright, light, almost floating structure, but for a solid block clad in light-colored clinker brick, which stands parallel to the tracks and shields the disturbing noise of rail traffic to the south like a noise barrier. The decision to structure the 145-metre-long façade with vertical pilaster strips was unusual. Although they are intended to protect the exhibition rooms from direct sunlight, they also give the museum block a rhythm that significantly softens its monumentality. This is strongly reminiscent of Rafael Moneo’s Museo Nacional de Arte Romano in the former Roman city of Mérida, which shaped the modern Spanish museum landscape in the 1980s like no other cultural building. Some other traces from the industrial past have also been left behind, such as the railroad tracks on the forecourt to the north, which is emphatically referenced by the emerging Plateforme 10 museum quarter. Barozzi Veiga designed the foyer and service areas on the first floor as an extension of the public space and installed generous window fronts, which makes the solid façade appear almost porous when illuminated at night. In a nod to the previous building, shed roofs were also installed on the museum roof, while the ceiling formation, divided into luminous rectangles, reflects the sunlight entering from the north in large funnels and distributes it as a diffuse light source in the exhibition rooms.
The architects have solved the access to the rooms of the temporary and permanent exhibition so intelligently that every visitor should take this for granted. Access to the 1,700 square meter collection and the 1,300 square meter temporary exhibitions on the two upper floors is spatially separated, as only the extensive collection of works by Félix Vallotton, Maurice Denise, Ferdinand Hodler, Jean Dubuffet, Balthus, Rebecca Horn and Thomas Hirschhorn is freely accessible. On the two upper floors, however, it is brought together horizontally with the areas of the temporary exhibition. (…)
You can find the article about the Musée cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne and the Tanzhaus in Zurich in our current Baumeister issue 02/2019.
