The Museum Brandhorst houses an important private collection of modern and contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries, mainly paintings. The building consists of an elongated timber-framed building and the head building, which marks the northeast corner of Munich's Kunstareal. Both parts of the building are clad in a spatially textured and polychrome shell, which makes the house appear as three interlaced individual volumes with graduated colours and tonality.

Inside, the naturally lit galleries extend over three levels, which are differentiated by variations in the sequence, size and proportion of the rooms. In the basement, the large daylit patio forms the prelude to a series of artificially lit cabinets for photography, graphics, book and media art. The exhibition areas on the ground floor are illuminated from the side by means of innovative light control, while the top floor is illuminated by skylights. This is where the largest rooms are located, including a gallery designed especially for Cy Twombly's monumental Lepanto cycle.

The outer skin of the building consists of glazed ceramic rods and a horizontally folded metal façade on the second level. According to the principle of kinetic polychromy, the result is a dynamic appearance with countless variations between a flat, almost dematerialized impression from a distance and that of a spatially woven structure from close up. Like a large abstract painting, the façade in the urban space draws attention to the museum as a place of living art.

While the main focus inside the museum is on creating ideal exhibition conditions, its polychrome exterior is intended to draw attention to its peculiarity as a place of aesthetic perception and living art. However, the multi-layer façade also has a technical task: in front of the substructure and the thermal insulation there is a horizontally folded two-tone sheet metal skin, whose fine perforations absorb the noise of car traffic on Türkenstrasse and Theresienstrasse. In front of this horizontally accentuated façade surface, 36,000 vertical ceramic rods (4 × 4 × 110 cm) glazed in a total of 23 different colours form an oscillating outer layer.

In the surface, the superimposition of horizontal and vertical lines, as well as the contrast and fusion of colours, create an overall effect that makes the closed outer walls of the house vibrate, almost dematerialising, because the surface of the building changes with the movement of the viewer. There are countless variations in materiality and structure between the oblique view, in which the vertical ceramic rods contract to form a solid surface, and the frontal view, in which the mineral skin opens up and the horizontally accentuated background becomes visible and dominant. Seen from a distance, the colour groups combine to form a neutral colour tone, each with a different brightness and its own colour impact. Viewed up close, each of these fields dissolves into its different individual colors.

Text: Sauerbruch Hutton
Photos: Jan Bitter

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