HANS HOLLEINS MASTERPIECE

The Austrian architect-artist Hans Hollein was appointed in 1972 to design a new museum for the post-industrial city of Mönchengladbach in West Germany which transformed it into a centre for contemporary art. This book reveals the full story of this innovative masterpiece. Opening in 1982, Museum Abteiberg was instantly lauded by international critics and Hollein was duly awarded the 1985 Pritzker Prize. It rapidly became a place of architectural pilgrimage, with more than 20,000 people flocking to visit in its opening week, well over a decade before Frank Gehry completed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

The book provides a timely and comprehensive reappraisal of the museum from concept, through the design process to its completion. It explains that Hollein was at his core a conceptual artist, perceiving the museum as provocative land art, with an architectural collage as exterior and a labyrinthine, ‘democratic’ interior, designed around the collection. It features a triptych of characters - Hollein, director Johannes Cladders and artist Joseph Beuys – whose close collaboration resulted in a museum which transformed thinking about how art, architecture and context – historical, cultural and geographical - should all relate. Radical at the time, many of the ideas that they first realised in this building have now become the norm in museum practice. Broader than a simple building study, this is a story which not only connects art with architecture and with the city, but with finance, corporate power and capital investment.

Eva Branscome is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Heritage at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London