23/12/2025
Need inspiration for a fascinating book to fill the long dark evenings this Winter? Are you interested in museums, cutting-edge architecture, exhibition design? 📖✨ We've got a suggestion...
'Hans Hollein's Masterpiece: Art, Architecture and the City' by Eva Branscome is the story of the Museum Abteiberg built in 1982 in the post-industrial city of Mönchengladbach in West Germany.
Museum Abteiberg was instantly lauded by international critics and Hans Hollein was duly awarded the 1985 Pritzker Prize. It rapidly became a place of architectural pilgrimage, with more than 20,000 people flocking to visit in its opening week, well over a decade before Frank Gehry completed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
This book provides a timely and comprehensive reappraisal of the museum from concept, through the design process to its completion. It explains that Hollein was at his core a conceptual artist, perceiving the museum as provocative land art, with an architectural collage as exterior and a labyrinthine, ‘democratic’ interior, designed around the collection. It features a triptych of characters - Hollein, director Johannes Cladders and artist Joseph Beuys – whose close collaboration resulted in a museum which transformed thinking about how art, architecture and context – historical, cultural and geographical - should all relate.
