Mulhouse-Pfastatt
Although we have been planning and executing projects with Rémy Zaugg for years, it did not mean that the design of his studio was clear to us from the start. Over the past thirty years, Rémy Zaugg has devoted himself, like no other artist, to finding and defining a suitable architectural context for the presentation of art; he has even published a textbook on the subject (Das Kunstmuseum, das ich mir erträume, oder der Ort des Werkes und des Menschen, Cologne, 1987 / The Art Museum of My Dreams, or the Place for Works and People). Even so, he wanted to address the question of his own studio without an architectural a priori.
The resulting studio functions equally as the artist’s place of work and as a place to present and view art, i.e. a small museum. As an exhibition space, the studio was a kind of prototype for the planning of the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, having given us the first opportunity to try out the concept of overhead lighting, projected for the museum in London. This overhead lighting is so simple that one wonders why it hasn’t been used in museum architecture before. Is it too simple, too primitive or not distinctive enough to bring out the individuality of the designing architect? Actually, the opposite is true. Thanks to its almost spectacular simplicity, the exhibition space acquires a peacefulness and concentration to which we are hardly accustomed in conventional museum spaces with their all-glass ceilings, suspended overhead lighting or ceiling grids.
Translucent slabs of glass inserted flush into square openings in the ceiling produce even, bright daylight. The amount of incoming sunlight can be tested on site by the simple means of applying self-sticking film to the overhead domes from above. This eliminates the multilayered roof construction, so popular among architects, and the elaborate technology required to operate it. Standard industrial elements were quite adequate for the roof domes, the more so since a private studio does not call for complex technical installations.
The two studio spaces are of the same height but differ in floor plan and placement in relation to the park-like garden. This simple arrangement allows for considerable flexibility in the use of the two rooms. Since Rémy Zaugg generally works on several projects at once, which he executes alone or with assistants, it is important to be able to vary the work spaces in the new studio (and in various other spaces that he has been using as studios over the years) and adapt them to the respective situation.
The walls of the building are fair-faced concrete; because we felt this material best complemented the patrician villa next to which the studio has been erected. Rainwater, collected on the surface of the roof, runs down over the concrete wall of the studio facing the villa and seeps into the earth next to a large tree.
The way the rainwater seeps into the earth and the typology of the building resemble to the near-by factory of Ricola Europe SA. Both buildings have two symmetrically constructed porticoes, but they fulfill very different functions. In the artist’s studio they form an outside extension to the interior space, an outdoor addition to the work area that can be used, for instance, to clean and dry silk-screening tools. In addition the protruding roof spatially encompasses the old garden wall of the adjoining factory premises.
Herzog & de Meuron, 1996
Collaboration with other disciplines is a distinctive feature of the studio, one of the longest-standing, most frequent and intense being with the artist Rémy Zaugg. Beginning in 1990 with the rezoning plan for the Burgundy University in Dijon, the list of works in common includes the Antipodes I complex on the same campus, the Basel town plan and the Aarau Museum annex. The painter’s studio beside his home in Mulhouse-Pfastatt was a further opportunity to prolong this exchange of ideas in which the artist took on his role as client from a dual perspective. With a body of pictorial work that has gradually distanced itself from representation, Zaugg has also produced books containing his experiments with perception and the definition of art spaces, which are highly influential in German Switzerland.
On a profusely wooded site, the new workspace is somewhat of a summary of the different scenarios that the painter has used as studios during his career. It is linked as an independent piece in the group consisting of the patrician villa and the gardener’s dwelling. The clinker brick wall around the property, an adjacent factory and the large linden tree that dominates the open space between the buildings were the keys for an architecture aimed at stressing the presence of the existing elements. The proposed concrete parallelepiped raises its sides in awnings that produce a sheltered outdoor zone while preventing this austere prism from being perceived in the garden as a bunker brandishing its isolationist will at the world. Work and exhibition space at the same time, the studio has two rooms of the same height, distinguished by their ground plan proportions and orientation rather than a designated function.
To define the calm space being sought, a roof lighting system was designed that rejects the artifice often associated with museum skylights. Covered by standard catalogue translucent pieces, the rectangular apertures in the ceiling provide constant, uniform lighting that is filtered through film attached to the outer face of the domes, thus obviating constructions and adjustment mechanisms to prevent excess lighting. Outside, the south headwall of the building again supports the mineral deposits washed down by rainwater. This painted background to the linden tree separating it from the house transforms this piece of architecture into a tool for reinventing creative activity.