02. Museum Hotel EscherBreuer

MusemHotel EscherBreuer

Renovating The American Embassy designed by Marcel Breuer to Escher New Art Works Museum Hotel

Project

Studio MuseumHotel
EscherBreuer 16/17

Master

Interior Architecture (INSIDE)

Location

Royal Academy of Art The Hauge, Netherlands

Guided by

Mark Veldman, OMA

Anne Hoogewoning

Team with

I-Chieh, Liu

Client

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Breuer’s American Embassy, The Hague

M.C. Escher

The news about a future vacancy of the American Embassy in The Hague, designed by the Brutalist architect Marcel Breuer, has brought up public debates and proposals. This project proceeded with one of the candidates, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, hoping to reuse the building, as a client. The mission was to propose Maurits Cornelis Escher Collection Museum as the new occupant and convert the building into a hotel.

Anchor 1

Concept

My given theme was ‘an intense art experience’. To evoke an intense spatial experience making optimal use of Breuer’s expressive architecture, I focused on M.C. Escher’s Tessellation Art and Breuer’s Trapezoid Panel(Facade). Escher’s art experience, with respect to Breuer’s legacy of the Embassy building, is mainly achieved by making the Trapezoid Stones look as if it have collapsed to the basement floor and is hanging in the air, forming a glass atrium in the main hall. This extension itself can be a large scale hanging installation, which is also an iconical branding of Escher Art Museum.

Design

Anchor 2

The design proposal can be translated by three main transitions; Breuers to Escher, Passengers to Visitors and Horizontal to Vertical.

The Museum building is designed based on my thesis research about ‘curating the space’.

+ Thesis