Modern Baroque: a provincial German art museum gets the Frank Gehry treatment.

Some of Frank Gehry's most innovative buildings are scattered across Germany, but only the Vitra Design Museum (AR December 1994 and the DG Bank in Berlin (AR August 2001) have attracted wide attention. MARTa, the museum of modern art and design in Herford, evokes the swirling, theatrical forms of southern Baroque more than it does the sober vernacular of this conservative heartland town, located midway between Cologne and Hanover. Locals might have been expected to reject it as an alien body, but there has been a positive response to the way that its undulating brick walls respect the cornice line of the street and amplify the flow of the Aa river behind. Gehry has performed the tricky feat of standing out and fitting in; creating new galleries, meeting spaces and a riverfront restaurant around the rational concrete frame of an abandoned textile factory.

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First mooted in 1998 as a three-in-one showcase for art, local history and the regional furniture industry, MARTa evolved into a unified art complex, intended for display, education and events; a catalyst 'for ideas and conflicting experiences--not a place where you can seek a kind of refuge', as artistic director Jan Hoet puts it. This veteran Belgian-born provocateur ran avant-garde museums in Ghent for thirty years and won acclaim for his direction of Documenta 9 in Kassel. From the time of his appointment in 2000, he reshaped the programme, and collaborated with Gehry, partner-in-charge Edwin Chan and project architect Kamran Ardalan to fine-tune the plans. However, most of the key decisions had been made and he took the design as a challenge to his skill as an impresario.

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Chan recalls that the project came along right after the completion of the Bilbao Guggenheim (AR December 1997) and, because the scale (of both the programme and neighbourhood) was so much smaller, the architects sought to give it the character of a house. In contrast to Bilbao, which beckons from afar, MARTa creeps up on you. Though the language of the undulating walls is sensual, the material is familiar in texture and tone and was locally crafted. Brick-clad lanterns pop up from the galleries like the crowns of hats. Brushed stainless steel plays a subordinate role in roofs that project out like tilted brims dividing the crowns from the facades below, until you arrive at the entrance piazza where it is employed for a cut-out marquee and canopy. To the right are five small galleries clustered around a larger space, all of which torque and are cut away as they rise above the height that pictures are hung. To the left of the piazza is a multi-purpose event staging and display space that can be rented out and was formerly intended to serve as an industry showroom.

The dialogue of old and new begins in a skylit concourse that separates the new facade from the four-storey white concrete shell of the factory. An expansive lobby, shop and services occupy the hollowed-out ground floor; above are galleries, classrooms, offices, and a furniture testing area. The juxtaposition of the austere and the exuberant intensifies on the river walk, where the structural frame emerges and leads to a free-form restaurant, cafe and bar. The ducks have the best view of this engaging spectacle, and it's notable that the old facade is concealed by the new street structure rather than--as in Berlin and other retro-minded cities--the other way around.

In the lobby, the walls, ceilings and columns and the curved stair leading to an upper gallery are clad in industrial-grade fir ply, Gehry's signature material before he achieved fame and fortune. This is Germany, so it's naturally impeccably detailed; MARTa is one of a succession of buildings supervised by executive architect Hartwig Rullkoetter. As a well-respected curator, Hoet has reconfigured and painted the 2000sqm galleries to house a succession of adventurous exhibitions, and a growing collection. Soon after the building's opening, he proudly claimed that the level of local hostility had substantially declined (from 95 to 45 per cent), and hopefully, it has continued to subside. Even in a major metropolis, the unfamiliar disturbs the majority of people, and it usually takes them a year or two to overcome their prejudices and grow attached to what they hated at first sight.

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