With the donation of six paintings and several graphic works to his hometown, painter and art theorist Josef Albers laid the foundation for the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop. This was his way of expressing gratitude for the honorary citizenship he was awarded by the city in 1970, which Josef Albers never forgot despite the closure of the Bauhaus by the National Socialists and his flight to the United States. The resulting Josef Albers Museum Quadrat is located in the listed Stadtgarten and consists of the Amtsrichtervilla, built in 1913, and the museum extensions designed by Bottrop architect Bernhard Küppers in the 1970s and 80s. Its three pavilions with square floor plans, interpreted after Mies' Barcelona Pavilion, house the collection, which has grown to more than 300 works from the Albers estate. In order to be able to display the globally unique collection and at the same time enable special exhibitions, an architectural competition was launched, which was won by Annette Gigon / Mike Guyer Architects from Zurich in 2016. In October 2022, the approximately 1,800 m² extension was opened with the exhibition "Josef Albers. Homage to the Square".

The two-storey new building with eight exhibition rooms adjoins the north-east and is accessed via a connecting bridge from the collection section. A large window immediately opens up a view of the park, while the exhibition rooms, ranging in size from 58 to 112 m², are deliberately designed to be understated in order to give priority and space to the art. A tour leads along solid wood floorboards made of light-oiled European oak, partly meandering, partly straight through the rooms, with views of the park and insights from outside to inside possible through four windows in all directions. The rectangular extension – note that it is not square! – thus receives plenty of natural light, which is supplemented by a dimmable, indirect artificial light strip with LEDs and reflectors in the shed roof. The park level also houses the museum education facilities, art storage, workshop, specialist library, offices and technical facilities. The shell of the extension is a curtain-type, rear-ventilated façade made of large-format powder-coated metal panels in black-brown with a deep matt pearlescent finish, which blends harmoniously into the park landscape.

www.gigon-guyer.ch

Photography Credits:

Stefan Müller
www.stefanjosefmueller.de

(Published in CUBE Ruhrgebiet 04|22)