Museum of Art in the Culture and Conference Center (KKL)

Architect Jean Nouvel

The 2,100 m2 (22,500 square feet) exhibition area of the new Museum of Art Lucerne is on the fourth floor of the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre (KKL) – right under the big roof, above the Lucerne Hall and the Conference spaces. This situation, unusual for a museum, means that almost all the exhibition halls can be supplied with daylight from above.

The Museum essentially consists of two large trussless roofs, divided up according to a strict grid by plaster partition walls. This concept was developed in collaboration with artist Rémy Zaugg.

The present division of the space produces rows of a total of 19 rooms measuring 10.5 x 6.5 m, 13 x 10.5 m and 26 x 10.5 m, with a ceiling height of 5.5 m. The passages between the individual spaces, with an area of 1.4 x 2.2 m, are unusually small – Jean Nouvel's intention was to create a succinct impression of enclosure in the spaces. Large paintings are moved through tall, narrow picture-doors.

The extraordinary abstraction of the Museum spaces – dark grey floor of polished concrete, white walls, illuminated ceiling – corresponds to the desire of the museum staff who were responsible for planning at the time, and who wanted to ensure the predominance of the art works over the architecture. Jean Nouvel speaks of the ‘nudité des espaces'. A few spectacular views of the inside of the building itself, of the lake and city, may be seen from the paned bridges that connect the two parts of the Museum.

The Museum spaces are equipped with efficient air-conditioning and security systems, as well as an electronic regulation of daylight and artificial light. In addition to the exhibition spaces, the Museum in the KKL has administrative spaces, a studio for art education, a multifunctional room with adjacent terrasse on the fifth floor and store-rooms in the basement.

Ideally, the architect would like to have built another museum. In an interview with Gerhard Mack, he speaks admiringly of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao . Gehry, he says, managed to create rooms which engaged in a dialogue with the works on show. Nouvel tacitly criticises the ‘white cube', the supposedly ahistorical exhibition architecture elevated above all social conditioning, the affirmative medium of the ‘autonomous art-work'. He doesn't mention that the individual architectural gesture of an architect such as Frank Gehry cannot act as a substitute for the integration of art into a comprehensive social context – actually an illusion of it.

Furthermore, the neutrality of Nouvel's museum spaces is more specific than the architect himself is willing to admit. It is a visual neutrality, a neutrality that privileges the visual nature of the architecture over any form of hapticity. The added walls separate rooms from one another, but they do not form places. Walls are screens, not constructive elements of an architectural body. But this might inform the whole of Jean Nouvel's architecture – the fact that he makes pictures.

It will be difficult for art works to assume their place within this architecture. If at all, they will form their place from within themselves. Any presence that a work may have in these spaces will be imbued with its previous and future absence. We might choose to see such a museum and such presence of the works within it in analogy with the formless spaces of the electronic FLUIDUM in which – all distances are abolished – the knowledge of the world flows in the form of particles of information. The ungraspability of this space for art will prompt argument and criticism. But at the same time we should like to stress that we do not believe that any contemporary museum architecture could fundamentally achieve anything else. Jean Nouvel's exhibits more clearly than any other the virtuality that threatens to impregnate any room in existence in the present day.

It would appear that the observed virtualisation of the space should no longer be seen in terms of a critique of the ‘white cube'. Conversely, the paradigm of the global electronic space might refer to a new form of the simultaneous accessibility of diverse and contradictory artistic works.

2000, Ulrich Loock, Director of the Museum of Art Lucerne until 2001