Type
culture

Source
competition

Client
private client

Address/Site
Neuhaus, Carinthia, Austria

Site area
36.565 m2

Building area
2.365 m2

Total floor area
4.585 m2

Storeys
sculpture field under main floor + main floor

Program
art exhibition, performance, events, cafeteria, storage

Structure
concrete platform, brick vaults, lightweight space frame

Cladding
coloured aluminium foil on wooden substructure

Architect
SADAR+VUGA (Jurij Sadar, Boštjan Vuga, Or Ettlinger, Tina Hočevar, Tomaž Krištof, Lucijan Šifrer, Luka Jančič, Matjaž Kofol)

The Liaunig Collection Museum will be built to house and present one of the most representative private collections of Austrian art after 1945.

It will offer the visitor a memorable experience by moving through it and viewing the exhibited art, surrounding nature, performances, and other visitors. Our proposal intends the museum’s spatial organisation to be an instrument for viewing, and further to be an instrument for experience.

There are two main structural elements that define the museum building: the core and the shell. The core is protected by the shell. It is massive and heavy. It is stable. It has a centre and four equal wings, which extend radially from the centre. The core houses the permanent collection.

Between the core and shell, a buffer space occurs, consisting of four different non-collection areas: entrance/performance, temporary exhibition, storage, and a cafe. The buffer space conditions are temporal.

The shell divides the buffer space from the nature outside. Connected to four legs, the shell provides a grounding of the museum building.

The sculpture field is the pure geometrically undulating ground under the museum building an external sculpture gallery. The sculpture field is naturally lit from four sides and through light-shafts towards the middle of the sculpture field.

There will be derivatives of private, domestic, non-museum, and non-exhibition rooms grafted into the spatial organisation of the museum, enriching the overall experience and giving the museum a very particular character. Chambers are room-like spaces, which appear in the brick wall between the non-collection and the collection space.

The museum will be open to visitors during the warmer months, between april and october. This is reflected in two very different conditions of the building: a summer, opened-up condition, and a winter, shut-down condition.