Gast-Ausstellung "Hollein Calling"

In the organizer's words:

Guest exhibition "Hollein Calling"

As part of the exhibition "ZukunftsRaum - Neue Formen des Zusammenlebens" (FutureSpace - New Forms of Living Together), the architecture class of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art is showing designs from the years 2024/25 that deal with the urban embedding of the Museum Abteiberg.

The exhibition will kick off with an opening event on July 16, 2025 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The exhibition will run until July 20 during the regular opening hours of the Bilker Bunker.

Background information:

The Museum Abteiberg is not finished. Hans Hollein's central idea of a connection between the museum and the city was not realized. The passage from the bridge to the city center, the routes via the walkable architecture ("walking architecture", Hans Hollein) with the museum roof as a new type of public square never became reality. The world-famous first museum of postmodernism with one of the most important international collections of contemporary art since 1960 therefore still appears today like a UFO that landed by chance in the post-war city of Mönchengladbach. Unlike the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or the MACBA in Barcelona, no new urban space has been created. The museum can hardly be seen or found and is still largely undeveloped in the third row of a city center in crisis.

The architecture class at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art refers to its former professor Hans Hollein (1967-1976) when it now revisits his first building together with its current professors (2024/25). Hollein's early design practice was as experimental and collage-like, as clearly related to the contemporary public as the students' current designs, which are partly analog and partly digital: This is because countless original drawings and documents of design processes have been preserved from Hollein's early practice, overdrawings, variants, experimental studies that repeatedly dealt with the acute ideal of novel uses, sensualities and symbolic qualities of architecture.

The designs of the 2024/2025 architecture class deal partly with the interior of the museum and partly with its exterior. They deal with the possibilities of finally creating a good place in the city center around the Museum Abteiberg, and with gaps or potentials in the building itself, where, for example, some key points of today's museum planning were still unthought of in the 1970s: large checkrooms for groups and school classes, school-appropriate sizes for their painting classes and workshops, multifunctional and representative rooms - for a functioning gastronomy and for the meeting of society in the city.

The Museum Abteiberg could actually change at the moment. In the coming months, the city's building department will realize the longed-for connection between the museum and the city. It will not be the passage Hollein envisioned, which would have been pushed through the rows of houses on the shopping street, but rather the demolition and removal of the now empty stores. A new urban space consisting of green areas, paths and recreational areas is to be created, providing a view of the museum from the (altered) city center. At the same time, the unresolved square situation to the side of the museum and the future of the closed underground parking garage are under discussion. A competition is to provide ideas on how a good urban space can be created there too.

Susanne Titz