"We wanted to continue the story of the Kunstpalast and not reinvent anything."

Part two of our Deep Dive Kunstpalast is dedicated to the new exhibition architecture of the museum, which will fully reopen in November 2023. We met Joachim Sieber, who won a Europe-wide tender with his Düsseldorf architecture firm and completed the conversion and renovation of the historic building after three years of construction. The city of Düsseldorf invested 50 million euros. 5,000 square meters of the collection tour were redesigned. Temporary exhibitions and the collection are now equally accessible via the main entrance and the central foyer. The museum catering area has also been renovated and the gate building has been closed with glazing. The Kunstpalast is not Sieber's first museum project. Among other things, his office created the exhibition spaces for the Philara Collection in the former glass factory on Birkenstrasse. A conversation about the art of omission and Düsseldorf's cosmopolitanism.

After your studies, including at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, you worked not only for Paul Schneider-Esleben, but also for Oswald Mathias Ungers. The new exhibition wing was designed by him - only the listed façade of the previous neo-baroque building remains today. Have you picked up a thread again?
Ungers initially entrusted me with the project management for the extension of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 1995, he won the competition for the redesign of the Kunstpalast and I should have been project manager here too. But I decided against it in favor of family planning and founded my own office in 1996. My wife and I met at Ungers and, strictly speaking, she still works for him, as she runs the Ungers Archive for Architectural Science alongside our architectural practice. In this respect, there was continuity, and it is of course nice to come back after such a long time and be back in the subject.

What immediately catches the eye is that the Kunstpalast now only has one entrance. This marks the end of the era of two entrances, one to the exhibition wing and a second to the collection wing. Today, visitors only use the former main entrance. The tour of the collection starts in the foyer of the exhibition wing on the second floor. As a visitor, I notice that everything is new and yet it looks as if it has never been any different. Was that your aim?
Exactly. The key question was: how can we present the collection for what it is? Something very special. The Kunstpalast is known for its large temporary exhibitions. However, the fact that there is a super broad-based collection was no longer part of the public consciousness. On the one hand, this is certainly because the second floor of the collection wing could not be used for decades - there were permanent problems with condensation after the last renovation. Secondly, I personally don't know of any museum that has more than one entrance and works really well. It was not only clear to us that the collection tour should start in the same place as the temporary exhibitions: in the foyer of the Ungers Building. The tour should also be recognizably uniform and at the same time the different structural phases should remain visible. Originally, today's three-winged complex consisted of two buildings: the Kunstpalast, where the Ungers Building is now located, and Wilhelm Kreis's art museum. Helmut Hentrich added a second floor to the original building in the 1980s. We wanted to continue the story and not reinvent anything.

What were the biggest challenges? For example, how did you deal with the monumental architecture, the legacy of Expressionism?
Wilhelm Kreis is the one who laid the foundations that we could not and would not have worked against. This building was once considered the most modern museum building in Germany. Kreis, for example, worked very innovatively with different lighting scenarios. He also came up with the idea of incorporating industrial elements such as skylights. And there was this strict grid. What we found was not a burden for us - on the contrary, we had a well-defined framework. However, we only became fully aware of one thing when we looked at the old documents in the city archives at the start of the project: The building was erected in less than a year in 1926 on the occasion of the upcoming GeSoLei (the great exhibition for health care, social welfare and physical exercise). You can't tell from the outside, but in fact every corner is built differently and each one had different defects.

In the Belvedere, which connects the two wings, there were such problems with the statics that barrier ropes on the second floor had to prevent visitors from straying too far from the center of the room. Today, it is a room with cozy seating areas, structured by the twin brick pillars. The deep windows allow a view over the entire Ehrenhof as far as the Tonhalle. The Anna Maria restaurant is located one floor below. To create the space for this, the former entrance to the GeSoLei exhibition grounds was glazed.
Museum gastronomy was the second central theme in the conversion of the Kunstpalast. A building of this size simply needs a functioning restaurant, and this is only possible if it is also accessible to the public from outside. The fact that the passageway was closed with this very transparent glazing gives the Ehrenhof a completely different spatial effect as an inner courtyard. I think the biggest plus is that the museum gastronomy not only enlivens the building itself, but the whole place. And the room at the top of the Belvedere is such a great space - I'm a bit jealous of the person who really invented it in 1926.

The newly designed museum rooms are characterized by their restraint - and that is precisely why there are original things to discover. Like the emergency exit signs, which only light up green on special occasions. Less discreet are the new sculptural spiral staircases. Did you want to immortalize yourself as an architect here?
With a project like this, it's about reducing the details further and further and then asking yourself: how much can we take away without it becoming banal? As the exhibition architecture itself should not come to the fore, it is important to consider: At which points do you set which signals? The spiral staircase in the Rubenssaal, for example, once wandered through the entire room during the design process and had all kinds of shapes - this staircase is crucial so that people follow the course and don't walk in the wrong direction.

The legendary Düsseldorf artists' bar Creamcheese has been faithfully reconstructed on the second floor of the Belvedere. The room is part of the exhibition and on Fridays and Saturdays after the museum closes it becomes a real bar. Were you involved in the revival of the Creamcheese bar and have you ever been a private guest?
Yes, of course I've had a drink here, it's my music, and we were also involved in the reconstruction. I never got to see the original on Neubrückstraße - I only moved to Düsseldorf in 1983. But there are photos and Heinz Mack's old plans, as well as many original parts. We rebuilt others, for example the Mack counter made of sheet steel. Of course, we talked to him about it.

What significance does art have for the city of Düsseldorf?
You can't overestimate that. Art and the city - it's like a couple that belongs together. The tradition alone, with Anna Maria de Medici and Jan Wellem, the Düsseldorf School of Painting, the Academy of Art - art brings a cosmopolitan feel to the city. It brings this expansiveness and the feeling of actually being close to current events. What Düsseldorf has to offer culturally as a city of this size is unique, not just in Germany, but in Europe, if not the world. My wife and I take full advantage of the diverse offerings. I'm not from here, but I'm a big Düsseldorf fan and of course I also love the liberal Rhineland. Live and let live. I know a lot of the world, but the Rhineland is one of the most open regions there is.

sieberarchitekten.de

Interview: Eva Westhoff
Photos: Courtesy of Joachim Sieber and Kunstpalast.