The most interesting building in Groningen is the Groninger Museum, north of the Netherlands with its cacophony of colors and shapes. Surrounded by water, it resembles a sea-going vessel which accidentally boarded in the city canal. Its popularity is likely the museum itself than the collections because it is a work of art in itself. Designed by the Italian Alessandro Mendini, it collaborates with guest architects were invited to design sections, pavilions, of the new Museum: the Italian designer Michele de Lucchi, Philippe Starck from Paris, and Coop Himmelblau. They were challenged to create diverse atmospheres, and the answer is a museum interior which is well adapted to the different kinds of material exhibited.

Mendini is an architect also designer, visual artist, poet and theorist. His work, in the thought of the former Director of the Groninger Museum, Frans Haks, captures the essence of the 1980s. The museum is arising on the opposite of the railway station in the water, and consists of three pavilions: one (the circular) made by Philippe Starck, one (the yellow tower) by Mendini himself and one (the deconstructive part) by Coop Himmelblau. The bridge connecting the station with the museum also is a direct and popular cycling and walking route to the inner city. There was also co-operation with Dutch architects and designers, such as the Groningen architects’ office Team 4 (project architect), Albert Geertjes and Geert Koster. Frans Haks himself also insisted on sub-architects to design the pavilions, as he wanted something spectacular.

From the roof construction to the restroom door handle and from stairwell to windows, it is considered single large exhibition. The permanent collections and often high profile exhibitions are really worth to see. The Museum shop in the Groninger Museum lobby provides designs by national and international designers, who include Starck, Alessi, and Mendini, as well as books about art, architecture, and fashion. Coop Himmelblau, founded by architects Wolf D Prix (Vienna, 1942) and Helmut Swiczinsky (1944), has the East Pavilion, a piece of a larger museum designed by multiple architects and the site of temporary museum exhibits.

The first look of East Pavilion is randomness and chaos. The structure is comprised of large, double-walled steel plates that alternate with hardened glass at the points where they do not match. The plates, to which the first sketch and a photograph of the design have been applied using tar, are topsy-turvy and even hang over the pavilion underneath at some points. With the wide staircase East Pavilion connects the two floors of the Mendini pavilion. The staircase also takes the visitor to the top pavilion, the vital section of the Museum. ‘It was as if a bomb had exploded’, confessed one city resident when the design was published. The capricious pavilion contrasts markedly with the rest of the building, designed by Mendini, with its austere and simple forms.

The design is a typical sample of deconstructivism style, which doesn’t take established architecture values and norms as his starting point but prefers to seize the spirit of the times: fragmentation, chaos, contrast, movement. Common constructive elements, such as the wall, floor, window or ceiling, have been dragged out of their normal function. A wall can also be a ceiling and a window or even a floor. According to Prix, the spaces that are created in this way are a result of force fields and movement. “Many of the techniques that we use originate from art, such as the adherence to the first sketch and automatic drawing, we wish to make use of the subconscious and develop new forms from there. We want to try to bring emotion back into architecture,” he says.

The concept is inspired on the idea of unfolding positive and negative space. Three exhibition areas have been created inside the pavilion, separated by indentations and recesses. The walls are made of steel and glass so that daylight can enter at unexpected places, an effort to contrast with Mendini’s closed realm. Coop Himmelblau is targeting to generate ’open architecture’, an interaction between inside and out, surprising the visitor by sudden quick looks of the exterior. Paths at different levels ensure that the visitor can view the artworks from every side: at ground level or from the gantry that cuts through the exhibition area a few meters above the floor. The design process involves computer modeling allowed the precise translation of the concept model into the finished building. Shaped like the hull of a ship, no wonder because the building are dominated by large steel plates built by ship builders rather than ordinary building contractors because of their higher flexibility and lower cost.

The beginning idea was to display paintings from the 16^th-19^th centuries there, as emphasize to the contradiction. But later, the pavilion came to be used regularly for three-dimensional work, such as exhibitions of the work of the British artist Mark Grinnigen and the American Rona Pondick. The areas here are very suitable for large events, even dance parties are held here occasionally at festive openings. The entire Coop Himmelblau pavilion is a three-dimensional artwork, resting on the pedestal formed by the Mendini volume clad in colorful laminate. The Groninger Museum’s architecture concept is increasingly being applied in modern museum elsewhere. In fact, the Museum itself is the most valuable item in the Groninger Museum collection of art. It is a work of art at the heart of the city, traversed by public areas where visitor are directly faced by all kinds of artwork.

The museum was mainly funded by the Gasunie, in order to celebrate its 25th anniversary and wanted to give the city of Groningen a present. Haks intended to move out of the decent and insufficient museum building then suggested a new museum, and 25 million guilders for the project is sufficient enough. The Groninger Museum also was one of the most important projects of Alderman Ypke Gietema. During the preparations before building, protesters managed, in high court, to halt the building process for a year. The neighborhood feared their common houses wouldn’t sell high compared with the fantastic museum form. However in 1992 the construction started and finished in 1994, and people had to get used with their new neighbor.

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