Gruuthusemuseum
In 2015, noAarchitecten took part in the competition for a new design and layout for the museum of the city of Bruges in the House of the Lords of Gruuthuse. They won with a proposal that was intended to move the visitor’s experience of the museum closer to the original feel of the house and the history of Bruges. The design is based on two complementary shifts. The first touches on the relationship between the museum and its urban context. The second concerns the interior. Both are based on a similar method, involving the study of historical documents and objects, not so much to find historical evidence for what should or should not be preserved or restored, or in other words for what might be ‘true’ or ‘false’, but to track down the historical experience and then extend it into the design.
Two drawings were decisive as far as the exterior is concerned: a sixteenth-century pictographic map of Bruges by Marcus Gerards and a seventeenth- century print by Antonius Sanderus. Both show the Gruuthuse with an enclosed inner garden. The architects realised the significance of this: it subtly screens the Gruuthuse off from the bustle of the city and turns it into a real house. With the aim of restoring this feature they designed a simple fence that re-established the inner garden. When Bruges city council included the entrance to the adjoining Church of Our Lady in the assignment, the architects proposed a pavilion instead of the fence, as a combined reception area for both the church and the Gruuthusemuseum. It is astonishing that, considering the value of this classified site, the city council – the client – was able to agree to the proposal of a new building. It seems however that they were convinced by the argument that this intervention is a contemporary interpretation of what is shown in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prints.
Several series of historical prints of the interior of the Gruuthuse have been preserved which show the house to be a place where objects that tell the story of the city’s history have accumulated over the centuries. Stimulated by the exceptional abundance of objects that are interwoven with the history of the city and the house itself, the architects looked for ways to enhance these layers of history in a new museum concept. They found the answer in the notion of the ‘room’ as the building block that gives their intervention its dimensions. Each room in the house of the Lords of Gruuthuse has been given its own atmosphere and identity, underpinned by the colours of the walls and the moderate conservation of the existing tile patterns or a fresh contemporary interpretation of what might once have been a tiled floor.
The unique character of each space, a world away from the standard white museum room, intensifies the experience of being on a visit to a very special house. NoAarchitecten established four categories of rooms. Where they encountered plain settings, they created museum spaces where objects from the collection are shown. As in the spaces that focus intensely on interpretation, the architects here made significant changes in design and layout. They made the rooms that emphatically show off the history of the museum into architectural spaces, thereby allowing the building to speak for itself. The circulation zones and relaxation spaces return the focus to the fact of visiting an historical house. This fragmentation of treatment is not conceptually unsound. There is a clear suggestion that each of the parts can be interpreted in its own right, but can at the same time be seen as part of the larger whole of the Gruuthusemuseum and even of the city of Bruges.
- Sofie De Caigny
This project is published in Flanders Architectural Review N°14. When Attitudes Take Form
