"I love museums, and I like thinking about them," says the Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor. The much-decorated Swiss architect has thought hard about what a museum can and should be today. Until now, the Fondation Beyeler was a solitary building set into the landscape on the edge of Basel, designed by Renzo Piano. Under Zumthor's direction, it has become an entire complex. He created a new building for the collection; a gatehouse, where artworks arrive and travel by tunnel into the galleries; and a glass pavilion with concert-hall acoustics that also hosts private events and dinners.
You can see how thoroughly the foundation has rethought its audience in other changes, too. The former manor house was until now mostly home to the restaurant. It now has new spaces run by the museum: a small orangery that serves coffee among the plants, and a very homey room devoted to vinyl records made by or with artists. The foundation also bought more land, which doubled its grounds and added a private garden full of beautiful old trees.
Those trees—ginkgo, magnolia, sequoia—couldn't be cut down, so they indirectly set the footprint of the new multistory exhibition building in pale Jura limestone. A work by Maurizio Cattelan perches on the edge of its roof: the Drummer Boy, who breaks into a drumroll at unpredictable intervals and is currently visiting the roof of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Cows graze beyond the old property line.
Windows onto the landscape
Zumthor chose materials that give the building a warmer color temperature than most museums have. The walls aren't painted but finished with a lime wash, which gives them unusual depth and tonal variation. They glow from off-white through eggshell to orange on afternoons when the sun sits low, and the art glows with them. Works by Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, and of course Claude Monet's famous Water Lilies triptych shift through the day as the sun moves. The triptych is the centerpiece of the collection Hildy and Ernst Beyeler assembled. The windows are placed to frame deliberate views of the landscape, from the Black Forest to the Jura Mountains.
The Jura also supplied the stone. The museum is built from it, or rather rammed together from it layer by layer, and the facade shows those layers like the growth rings of a tree trunk. Zumthor is known for his extremely deliberate approach to materials and to time. "And I love places with a beautiful history. Besides, I'm from here."
The great Swiss architect was most recently admired around the world for his expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). With the Beyeler building, he returns to the area around Oberwil, where he grew up.