Neue Staatsgalerie
An extension to Stuttgart’s art museum that combines a classical rotunda and stone façades with brightly coloured handrails, glass walls like waves and stone blocks that have “fallen” out of the wall. The museum shows postmodernism’s delight in borrowing and playing.
Since the 1840s Stuttgart’s state art museum had occupied a neoclassical building that was no longer adequate, and in 1977 the state of Baden-Württemberg announced a competition for an extension. The British architect James Stirling won together with his partner Michael Wilford. Construction took place in the early 1980s, and the museum opened in 1984. The site lay on a slope along a major traffic artery, and the brief also included a chamber theatre and a music school. Stirling wanted the building to fit into the city and respond to the old museum, while at the same time being unmistakably contemporary. He clad the concrete frame with bands of travertine and sandstone and combined them with glass and steel sections in strong colours.
The building is organised around an open, roofless rotunda, a kind of sculpture court recalling the Altes Museum in Berlin and ancient ruins. A public footpath winds through the rotunda, linking the streets below and above the site, so that people can pass through the museum without going in. The museum itself has a sequence of top-lit galleries in a classical arrangement. The entrance hall has an undulating green glass wall, and outside run thick handrails in pink and blue. In one place a few stone blocks lie on the ground as if they had fallen out of the wall, and the opening behind them serves as ventilation for the car park. Stirling mixed the solemn and the playful quite deliberately.
The Staatsgalerie attracted great attention and debate when it opened. Many saw it as a masterpiece, while others criticised the mix of classical forms and pop colours. The building became very popular with visitors and helped postmodernism achieve an international breakthrough in the 1980s. Stirling had already received the Pritzker Prize in 1981, and after Stuttgart he designed several other museums and university buildings. The building has since been renovated, and the museum has gained further extensions. Today it is among the most frequently cited examples of postmodern architecture. In Sweden, too, it was keenly discussed among architects, and it showed how a museum could connect with the classical museum tradition of Schinkel while also becoming part of the city’s network of footpaths.