The motto of the competition entry was “Findling” (boulder) that expressed an alien and isolated object in a landscape. However, while eschewing the building’s obvious integration with the emerging settlement at the edge of the old town, the pentagonal configuration together with the polygonal stone pavement and local stone walls create a series of external spaces that relate to the surrounding streets and plots.
Within the pentagon, the square auditorium of timber construction was to have been suspended from two reinforced-concrete beams. The single-storey foyer on the perimeter would have been day-lit through skylights.
Herzog & de Meuron, 1995