A building I love
My Roman Empire is the interior spaces of the Glyptothek museum in Munich. I visited in the summer of 2024 and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. This post is to document some observations and get them out where I can reference them.
I’m always on the lookout for architecture inspiration; I’ve got an ongoing project file to design the Studio Kirkland ‘weirding haus.’ This is our codename for a new home, a small empty-nest-compatible house that’s planned for resilience in a changing climate, with a focus on maintainability. Aesthetically, I’ve always wanted a home to be a cold concrete box. Anyways, all my ideas were shaken up by this building.
It’s so beautiful. From the outside, the museum is a a kind of bland classical temple. Could be anywhere. But I love classical sculpture, so a large collection of sculptures from antiquity is Matt Catnip.
Nice enough, obviously, but inside is what blew my dome. The walls and ceilings are all this lightly plastered brick; apparently it was originally built with frescoes but they didn’t survive WWII, and this is how they’ve restored it. It’s a series of domes and barrel vaults, with some interesting brickwork that saves it from a kind of de Chirico uncanny valley.
The museum is a square, where you enter from the front portico and then can move around the square circuit in either direction. There’s a large courtyard in the middle.
(Shoutout to original architect Leo von Klenze and funder Bavarian King Ludwig)
You can see the park-like setting is quite nice too.
Because it’s all arranged around a courtyard, it has huge interior windows, which floods the galleries with natural lighting. I don’t think there even are any windows that face out, at all?
I was never there after dark so I don’t know how these rooms feel with any kind of artificial lighting. Maybe there are LED strips hidden in that break between the vertical wall and the bottom of the barrel vaults.
The front two corners have round rooms with interior domes and skylights above; these are gorgeous feature rooms that highlight showstopper sculptures.
Of course, it’s a museum and it’s full of incredible work; that lends some aura.
And now I have spent a lot of time in my sketchbook trying to scale this building down to something that would work as a house. Daydreaming about where we’d put a kitchen, and library, and guest rooms. It defeats many of the principles I’ve been designing from (minimal roof space, centralized mech services, easily replaceable/composable parts). But damn if it didn’t feel great to actually BE in. I spent a lot of time here, going back to enjoy the spaces themselves, but also to just hang out and draw.
