Letting in the light: Gunther Domenig sensitively breathes light and life back into the Nuremberg Kongresshalle, a relic of Nazi history.

Nuremberg's unenviable position in recent history was assured when it was designated the 'city of the party congress' by Hitler in 1933. Masterplanned by Albert Speer at his most Brobdingnagian, a parkland site to the south-east of Nuremberg was selected to form an appropriately heroic backdrop to the spectacle of Nazi rallies, staged there every September until 1938 in a series of monumental stadia, barracks, fields and grandstands. What was once the Wehrmacht's greatest parade ground, immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film Triumph of the Will, has long since been made over as a setting for more innocuous recreational pursuits, but the scars of history cannot so easily be erased and the question of what to do with such loaded 'heritage' remains a painful problem for political and cultural agencies. Predictably, arguments range from completely erasing all physical traces of the Third Reich to preserving selected fragments as a reminder and warning to future generations.

Buoyed along by this debate is Germany's emerging 'memory industry', packaged and given expression by architects such as Daniel Libeskind (Jewish Museum), Peter Eisenman (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) and Peter Zumthor (Topography of Terror). To these ranks can be added the Austrian architect Gunther Domenig, who, following a limited competition staged by Nuremberg's city council, was commissioned to convert part of the mammoth Kongresshalle into a Centre for the Documentation of the History of the Third Reich, a forum for a new and particularly chilling branch of cultural archaeology. Originally the showpiece of Speer's megalomaniac plan, the Kongresshalle (by Ludwig Ruff and his son Franz) is a now a decaying neo-Classical dinosaur, an ignominious testimony to the crassness and folly of Nazi ambition. Conceived as a latterday Colosseum, it consists of a semi-circular building linked to two secondary courtyard blocks. Together they enclose a horseshoe-shaped space intended to house 50 000 seated s pectators, but it proved impossible to construct a roof over such a huge volume (1930s architectural technology could not rise to the occasion) and so remained roofless and incomplete. Construction was finally abandoned in 1942, with interiors half-finished and most brick walls still awaiting their granite cladding (furnished by slave labour).

Domenig's new intervention impinges only on the Kongresshalle's northernmost courtyard block, but his tactics are unequivocally and admirably confrontational. Here the present grabs the past firmly by the lapels, driving a literal and symbolic wedge through the Reich's ponderous Cartesian geometry. The wedge can be read as many things, an artful knife gash or a cleansing blade of light, that scythes through the brooding masonry hulk with powerful economy and clarity in order to illuminate the building's past and its role in wider history. Equally symbolically, Domenig's work does not interfere with the original layout; all the new exhibition spaces are carved out of the existing rooms, which retain their atmosphere of slightly gloomy melancholy. By contrast, the building's new study centre is a light-filled eyrie perched on the roof with views over the Reich's former parade grounds.

Domenig's light gash is positioned slightly off the block's diagonal axis, culminating in a glazed slit on the north-east corner that marks the new entrance. The immediate impression is of menace, fuelled by architectonic imbalance and astringency. The rooftop study centre looms out precariously over the corner and the steep flight of steps leading up to the entrance is sheltered by a jutting, claw-shaped canopy. Domenig's brittle language of angular metal and glass is a consciously lightweight, dynamic counterpoint to the heaviness and stasis of the granite, brick and achingly formal symmetry. The light gash forms a long narrow corridor (1.8m wide and 130m long) that slowly slopes up from the entrance hall, punctures the courtyard and finally erupts into the Kongresshalle's derelict main arena, cantilevered in space like a giant dart or sword lodged in the wall.

Nineteen exhibition spaces are arranged as an enfilade of rooms that define an L-shaped route through the building, with its Italian marble columns, high ceilings and aura of faded imperial grandeur. The light gash corridor connects and bisects these spaces, exploring and dissecting the labyrinth of the interior. A lecture theatre, its geometry also calculatedly at odds with the neo-Classical order, is planted in what would have been the original grand entrance hall. The sense of physical dislocation and uneasy co-existence between old and new seems well suited to the building's reconstituted role as a means of evaluating and coming to terms with a profoundly disturbing past. Domenig's radical architectural vision lets in the light in more ways than one.

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect

Gunther Domenig, Graz

Project team

Gunther Domenig, Gerhard Walner, Sandra Harrich

Assoicate architect

Rudolf Bormberger

Structurual engineer

Rieger + Brandt

Services engineers

Dess-Falk; SKT-IBH-Dauphin

Photographs

Paul Raftery/VIEW