This SAHGB - IHR seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and in person at the Institute of Historical Research, Pollard N301 (3rd Floor, North Block of Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU).
Abstract:
When the celebrated German curator, Johannes Cladders, became director of the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach in 1967, that post-industrial town was best known for football. Housed in a neo-gothic bourgeois mansion, the museum held an odd assembly of cultural objects, religious relics and twentieth-century artworks. Packing those items away, Cladders reinvented the venue through a sequence of ground-breaking exhibitions. Starting with Joseph Beuys’s first-ever retrospective exhibition in 1967, Cladders put the museum onto the international map. From the outset, Cladders’ discontent with his building was evident, so he lobbied for a new purpose-built museum to promote the emerging avant-garde.
Hans Hollein was appointed in 1972 to design the new Mönchengladbach museum, opening in 1982. It was instantly lauded by international critics for integrating externally into the city as an architectural collage of building types that stood out in contrast to the monolithic megastructures that had been so popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Its town planning established a dialogue with the ancient Gothic abbey, but also drew from the post-war streetscape, fusing with the fragmented fabric of the place as a surrogate urban landscape. Over 20,000 people came to see the museum during its opening week, becoming a pilgrimage for those interested not so much in avant-garde art, but architecture. Charles Jencks, Kenneth Frampton, and Joseph Rykwert went there and wrote about the place. The museum led to a new type of architectural tourism where people flocked to the city to see the building, and Frank Gehry has stated that the Guggenheim in Bilbao would not have been possible without this important precedent.
This talk is based on the forthcoming book: https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/hans-holleins-masterpiece
Speaker Bio:
Eva Branscome is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Heritage at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK. Her teaching approaches architectural history & theory in several ways: as an independent field of study, as directly relevant to students’ design processes, and as a factor within heritage environments. Alongside PhD supervisions, she coordinates or tutors on Bartlett architectural history & theory modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, notably the MA Architectural History.
Originally trained as an interior architect, her research follows two strands: the links between built heritage and cultural practices in contemporary cities, and the modern architectural history of Central Europe. She is the author of Hans Hollein and Postmodernism (2018), the first major monograph about that famous Austrian architect-artist. Increasingly her research examines the complicity of architecture with social injustice, seen in the 2023 UCL/SAHGB conference she co-organised on ‘Constructing Coloniality: British Imperialism and the Built Environment’.
Registration:
Register using the form below. You will be emailed prior to the seminar with a reminder of the joining information shown on the following screen.