Two museums in one sculptural building
Mudac and Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne
© Mathieu Gafsou
Over recent years, a museum quarter named Plateforme 10 has come about at the site of a former engine shed at Lausanne Main Railway Station. The Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts (MCBA) by Barozzi Veiga saw its inauguration there in 2019, and now a second new-build – this time designed by Aires Mateus in partnership with the Itten + Brechbühl architectural practice – is to open its doors in June.
© Philippe Bréchet
“One museum, two museums“ is the apt motto that the Lisbon-based architects gave the design that went on to win them the respective architectural competition in 2015. The task in hand was to take the Elysée photography museum and the Museum for Design and Applied Arts – i.e. two cultural establishments involving very differing layout and lighting requirements – and unite them under a single roof.
For the architects, the site was an urban development tabula rasa: it had once been dug out of the steeply rising natural terrain for construction of the engine shed, and high retaining walls keep the elevated residential district to the north at a distance. While the MCBA building demarcates Plateforme 10 from the railway tracks to the south, Aires Mateus has set the two-part new-build at the western end of the quarter.
© Mathieu Gafsou
The museums are contained in a solitary white concrete cube with 42 m long sides and two above-grade and two below-grade levels. The large, uninterrupted top-lit space of the Design Museum accounts for the topmost floor; on the first below-grade level the Photography Museum opens onto three interior courts dug into the ground. The depot and storage rooms for both museums are situated in the lowermost level.
© Mathieu Gafsou
© Mathieu Gafsou
On the ground floor, the shared entrance hall featuring a cafe, bookstore and cloakroom serves not only as a link between the two uses but also sets them apart. A circumferential light slit also makes the separation of the room programme visible from the outside and provides outwards views onto Lake Geneva.
© Philippe Bréchet
The ceiling and floor with their myriads of angular folds giving the entrance hall a cave-like topography meet at solely three points that act as cores containing side rooms while also bearing the 1000 tons of the whole upper section. Immense steel beams are concealed behind the folded concrete ceiling, while a roof in a serried sawtooth arrangement tops the uppermost exhibition space. Areas not open to the public, such as offices, conservation workshops and a further area of storage rooms, are contained in an L-shaped building that accommodates the existing escarpment and flanks the solitary building in the north and west.
Read more in Detail 6.2022 and in our databank Detail Inspiration.
Architecture: Aires Mateus e Asociados
Client: Staat Waadt
Location: Place de la Gare 17, 1003 Lausanne (CH)
Structural engineering: Afaconsult, Ingphi
Landscape architecture: Atelier Grept
Facade planning: BCS
Building services engineering: SRG Engineering
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