Bregenz is a traditional town on Lake Constance in north Austria, close to the borders with Germany and Switzerland – hardly the most obvious place for architectural experimentation. Yet it happens to be the locus for a museum, the Kunsthaus Bregenz, a quintessential 1997 design by Peter Zumthor.
In reaction to the social and cultural transformations being wrought by globalisation, Zumthor’s work typifies a retreat into more private, localized architectural forms. Nowhere is it possible to pursue this rarefied approach to practice with such care and quality as Switzerland. Zumthor has hence become the guru for architects fascinated by the physicality and weight of materials, and by phenomenological aspects such as interior atmosphere and bodily experience. Ignoring globalizing forces and following instead an older craft-based tradition, Zumthor came to fame through the Vals Thermal Baths, another mid-1990s project, set in a stunningly picturesque Alpine location.
Zumthor’s intellectual underpinning is derived from the 19th-century German architect/theorist Gottfried Semper, whose writings explored the historical links between architecture, technology and culture. In the mid-1850s, Semper was the founding professor for a prestigious new architectural school in Zurich (today ETH Zurich), and his shadow still falls over many Swiss architects. While the Semperian influence typically tends towards heavy facades that allude to weaving and other handicrafts, the Kunsthaus Bregenz is strikingly the polar opposite.
As a cube wrapped entirely with a façade of 712 identical panels of etched glass, each measuring 1.72 metres by 2.93 metres and hung around the building’s four facades as if they were shingles, the museum’s interior can only be guessed at from the outside. This is also because, set back 900mm, there is a second perimeter layer of glass which controls daylight entering the main gallery space on each floor, with metal grille walkways in between the two glazed layers. On the side of the building that looks onto a small square, Zumthor places the staircases so that these can be detected as a diagonal façade pattern whenever it is sunny or when daytime turns to dark. Internally the gallery on each floor has a frosted glass suspended ceiling, again modulating light in an astonishingly subtle manner.
