Fondation Beyeler Opens $144.9 M. Peter Zumthor Expansion After 30 Years

The Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, has opened a $144.9 million expansion designed by Basel-born architect Peter Zumthor, capping nearly three decades since the museum's founding and a decade of construction.

The expansion adds three structures to the campus surrounding the museum's original Renzo Piano–designed gallery: a 16,000-square-foot gallery building named for Swiss entrepreneur and billionaire Hansjörg Wyss; the Ammann Pavilion, a performance venue honoring Swiss art dealers Thomas and Doris Ammann; and Erlen Torhaus, an office space named after the Lange Erlen, the park stretching from Basel to Riehen, on which Zumthor received permission to build.

Beyeler director Sam Keller told ARTnews that the decision to attach a critically acclaimed architect to the Piano building was not commercial. "It was an artistic and cultural decision," Keller said. "First of all, it's not the goal of the expansion to have more visitors. We love visitors and we're happy if they're coming, but we are already the most visited art museum in the country." The museum welcomes 500,000 visitors annually. "The point was to have both a spatial and conceptual expansion."

Zumthor, who recently completed a new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, won a competition in 2016. Keller and his jury drew up a long list of 100 architects worldwide with experience balancing art display and natural surroundings, then cut it to an 11-firm shortlist that included Made In Architects, SANAA, and Tod Williams Billie Tsuen Architects. During the decade of refinement, the Beyeler hosted workshops with artists to determine what kind of gallery spaces would best serve the art on view.

The surrounding nature preserve, the Naturschutzgebiet Eisweiher, is integral to the campus. Keller praised Zumthor's handling of light: "He elevates and enhances the environment in which he works in. [Some] architects that come from the south think they have to block the light, but in the north you have to invite it in."

Zumthor shaped the new buildings around their environs. The Wyss gallery rises in a Y-shape to conserve the park's old trees. Its exterior uses rammed concrete mixed with crushed limestone from a quarry in Laufen, roughly 12 miles from the museum, with each block hand-rammed by 11 workers. "I like art museums that really only serve art," Zumthor said. "The museum itself was meant to be just for the art."

The inaugural exhibition, "Constellations," begins in the Piano building, where light enters from above. Visitors move past waif Alberto Giacometti sculptures, a room of Picassos, and Fischli/Weiss's comical sculpture Animal (1986). Compared with the Zumthor addition, the Piano building feels stagnant, though its glass-walled gallery overlooking a water lily pond remains its most charming feature.

The Wyss Gallery sits a few minutes' walk away, one foot in the park and the other on a grey-paved museum plaza. It appears to have been there forever, hiding among the trees and residential houses beside the museum. Where architecture separates the two buildings, curation connects them. "Constellations" continues in the Wyss gallery, where side light illuminates scattered Roni Horn glass-and-water sculptures that change hue throughout the day. The high ceilings give the works room: Constantin Brâncuși's marble-and-limestone L'oiseau (1923/1947) commands the space, while Wolfgang Tillmans's 2022 photograph tree filling window imitates an open window in a closed room.

Outside, working with landscape architecture firm Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten, the museum has doubled the park to just under five acres and dotted it with sculptures by Rachel Whiteread, Louise Bourgeois, and Fischli/Weiss. A new greenhouse will soon host educational programming led by the Beyeler's inaugural botanical curator, Rahel Kesselring.

"We realized that we have very high-quality architecture, art, curators, and conservators, but we actually know very little about our natural environment and we look at our museum as a garden, we're planting things that will bear fruit in future generations," Keller said.

The expansion also rethinks the visitor experience. The museum now has up to six entrances and exits, letting visitors curate their own routes. "People like the freedom and it means we also trust them and we're giving them some responsibilities," Keller said. With the buildings complete, the Beyeler's next task is folding the Eisweiher preserve into its programming — the conceptual expansion Keller set out to achieve.