Gigon & Guyer

The Zurich architect couple Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer are known for creating places for intense contemplation. After the Kirchner Museum at Davos, the extension of the Winterthur art museum, the renovation of the Winterthur collection Oskar Reinhart, their new museum project at Appenzell also exhibits a powerful, idiosyncratic sense of aesthetics. The Museum Liner, dedicated to the Appenzell painters Carl August and Carl Walter Liner, father and son, presents itself as a sculptural design: the very antithesis to descriptive postmodern architecture that threatens to draw attention away from the exhibits, this museum by Gigon and Guyer rests on the imperative of clear stereometrics and neutral spaces. In a rather subtle way, the architects succeeded in both integrating the new structure into the rural surroundings and the surroundings into the building. The fragile balance of mutual integration and partial participation may well serve as a metaphor for the difficult relationship between life and art. This book features the building, completed in 1998, in a photographic sequence by Gaston Wicky and textual essays by Hubertus Adam and Peter Dering.