Graubünden Museum of Fine Arts | Chur, Switzerland | 2016

Architects: Barozzi / Veiga 
Associate Architects: Schwander Sutter Architekten
Project Manager: Walter Dietsche Baumanagement AG
Client: Hochbauamt Kanton Graubünden
General Contractor: Walter Dietsche Baumanagement AG
Structural Engineers: Ingenieurbüro Flütsch
Landscape Architects: Paolo Bürgi Landschaftsarchitekt
Photographers: Simon Menges

The project for the extension of the Graubünden Museum of Fine Arts, in Chur, is an exercise of urban integration, and therefore, and spite of the limitations of the piece of ground, the project aims to minimize its exterior volume inverting the logical order of the uses program. Then, the exhibition rooms are located underground, so that the exterior volume only hosts the public access spaces. This approach of the project allows generating on the exterior a new public space that incorporates the surrounding gardens to the Villa and adapts the scale to the exterior volume to meet a balance with the surrounding buildings.

The expansion is an autonomous building, independent from the historical, but the main effort of the project is aimed to reinterpret those concepts that allow establishing an architectonical dialogue between those two buildings, a continuum between the Villa Planta and its extension.

Regarding its spatial organization, both buildings present a symmetrical central plan and use geometry as cohesion tools. In the extension, this classic configuration also allows simplifying the structural system and organizes the exhibition rooms’ system in two inferior levels. Some exhibition spaces the proportion and treatment of light of which are the main points.

On the outside, while the Villa Planta’s ornament transmits the oriental influence of its origin, in the extension, the compositive system of its façades reinforces its expressivity and autonomy against the Villa. Both buildings show an own identity based on some shared rudiments, structure and ornament, which reinforce the idea of a whole.