LIGHT WAVES.

Nijmegen's bold new museum is a light-filled repository for art.

Supermarket, temple and social meeting place; programmatically, the contemporary museum is an ever evolving hybrid space. Both technically and structurally, museum buildings are no less heterogeneous, made up of a mosaic of routes, changing installations, blank walls, and variable lighting conditions. UN Studio's new provincial museum in Nijmegen explores how these demands can be integrated into a composite, homogeneous form, capable of absorbing and responding to changing conditions.

The brief brought together the town's two existing and very diverse collections of archaeological artefacts and modern art. Each was unsatisfactorily housed in a separate building and required space for expansion, so a competition was held for a single new museum. This was won in 1995 by van Berkel & Bos, now practising as UN Studio. Municipal pride in the project is reflected in the allocation of a prominent historic site, close to the medieval city wall and the town's oldest park.

The new building butts up along the edge of a triangular piazza, confronting the town on one side and Kelfenbos park on the other, with views of Roman ruins and the river Waal. Consisting of a rectangular box mounted on a black stone plinth, the museum is a long, low and somewhat hermetic structure. The box part is clad in sleek, horizontal panels of greenish-blue translucent glass, with occasional pockets of transparency. At night, light palpitates gently through the delicate glass skin, so dematerializing the building mass.

The museum's elemental simplicity belies a surprising diversity of internal spaces. Public, administrative and storage functions are housed in the ground and basement, while museum and exhibition spaces occupy the first floor. The three floors are connected by a 15m wide staircase, which cuts a ceremonial swathe through the museum and extends outside to unite building with town. From the piazza, the stair puns into the museum, on a slightly off-centre axis, past the caf[acute{e}], foyer, museum shop and library, and up to a promenade area at first floor offering an elevated vantage point over the park. This marks the start of the museum circuit, but the route is not prescribed: instead, visitors can determine their own itinerary through a series of cellular galleries with multiple lateral openings arranged in parallel streets. Attracted by light, cross views or exhibits, visitors can weave through the galleries at will. In this way, the conventional static floor plan is challenged and deformed by the fluid p atterns of movement (although curators trying to construct coherent displays or publish a definitive exhibition guide might beg to differ). Yet for a modest municipal museum with a disparate collection, the flexibility seems to work and extends UN Studio's preoccupation with circulation as a form generator, most radically explored in the practice's recent Moebius House (AR September 1999).

Above the labyrinthine galleries, internal coherence is provided by the sensuously undulating ceiling, which follows the route of the stair. Where visitors congregate, the undulations are fullest, but in gallery spaces they are shallower and less frequent. The ceiling is a lightweight slatted structure, with the mechanics of lighting and services set above it, partially visible through the slats. Light filters through the diaphanous structure, supplementing cool north light for those exhibits that can be exposed to daylight. Eggshell blue floors soften the clinical white walls and ceiling and form a neutral backdrop for the great variety of artefacts.

Distinguished by subtlety and invention, Nijmegen exploits materials and light to create a luminous repository for art.