Schaulager
The Schaulager ('viewing warehouse') is neither museum nor traditional warehouse. It keeps the Emanuel Hoffmann collection in optimal condition and is primarily accessible for specialists: conservators, curators, researchers etc. The heavy outer wall is built up in layers and its outer surface scratched, exposing the pebbles excavated on site. This material is not only a visual expression of weight and storage but also, as a result of its great inertia, an essential factor in the interior climate control. On one side the box is somewhat indented, creating a forecourt, so that the entrance side is visible from great distance. It appears to be guarded by a small building with a gabled roof. The courtyard-like space radiates urbanism and publicness. Schaulager is thus not simply an anonymous box on the urban periphery, but rather a place that is active and self-confident, expanding the public dimension of the city of Basel to the south, towards the new district of Dreispitz/Münchenstein.
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The entrance, the grand reveal, is worth any distance that you have travelled. Herzog & de Meuron take the masterful modern sculpture of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin and through a triumph of subtle parallaxes bring it to the scale of a cubic death star.
The ground-floor layout for the current (August 2010) Matthew Barney exhibition takes Palladian ideals and realises them in a strictly minimal palette of materials.
The café and shop utilise local furniture maker Vitra's products: shiny, organic and white, the tables and chairs appear as monadic stalagmites fallen from the undulating ceiling.
The surprises in this building are endless. Plays of perspective and parallax, subleties of programme, and an exacting precision in the use of colour all add up to, for this commenter, an architectural epiphany.
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