Square deal.

The problem of Ulm - how to resolve the square in front of the world's tallest Gothic spire - has puzzled generations of architects. Meier's new building enhances the space and sets off the minster while having presence in itself.

Richard Meier's design for the Ulm Stadthaus(1) is one of three significant European city projects that he has recently realised. The others, now nearing completion, include the city hall and library at the Hague and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.(2) All three projects are centred on the concept of a major public square, either roofed as in the Hague's massive atrium, or traditionally open to the sky as at Ulm and Barcelona. In each case, Meier has drawn on his accumulated experience of urban space from Northern and Southern European cities.

Although his output of new buildings in Europe over the last decade has also included major achievements in Luxembourg and Paris, as well as elsewhere in Germany and the Netherlands, the characteristic that is crucial to the current series of major city buildings was first evidenced in the Museum for Decorative Arts in Frankfurt (AR November 1985). In this seminal building of 1979-85, Meier's capacity to generate and control forms through the fundamentals of the site planning itself first emerged.

The development of site planning evolves into a three-dimensional process for generating forms has matured into an architecture of significance in Ulm, Barcelona and the Hague. But, in the case of the Danube city of Ulm, the results are particularly critical and rewarding.

Here, Meier has developed an authentic urban architecture(3) as a response to both the local context of the Ulm Stadthaus and its wider mission - the ensemble of minster, square and Stadthaus establishing a new identity for Ulm.

During the inauguration events,(4) Meier expressed a view of the international dimension in contemporary architecture: 'We live in an international society, whose concerns are worldwide - on a world scale, not in a closed society. We travel and feel for people, all over the world. [But], this building is for Ulm, not another place'.

The building exemplifies Richard Meier, above all, as a civic architect who creates both a public realm with a renewed sense of place and offers public space in architecture as a work of art, realised through the art of building and site planning. Internally, the building also contains a further insight into Meier's complex quality of space celebrated in light - and a foresight of the extent that this synthesis may be demonstrated in his architecture, in the future.

The Ulm site, the area of the Munsterplatz, is one of the most notoriously difficult in Europe and had originally contained a medieval monastery where the Stadthaus now stands. In the 1890s, clearing of the site to provide a setting for the world's tallest cathedral spire created a problem that the subsequent 100 years of fruitless architectural competitions could not resolve. The tabula rasa produced by the bombing of Ulm in 1944 removed almost all the remaining medieval fabric around the minster and hasty reconstruction did nothing to redefine the platz.

However, in 1986 after further competitions failed, Richard Meier won the final contest involving 10 invited architects. More turbulence followed the route to completion, but the inauguration and the triumphant popular reception of the building in November 1993, vindicated the faith the town council had placed in selecting and supporting Meier's concept.

Meier produced a series of site plans showing the original condition and site of the medieval monastery on the south-west of the Munsterplatz, leaving an urban square that is not adequately contained or defined.

Meier's first proposal included both the Stadthaus and further extensions incorporating a bank and other facilities that lined up to form a complete southern edge to the platz. This project included several cubic forms and two entry courtyards to the square, as well as the main encircled cube of the Stadthaus itself.

The wall of buildings brought essential definition to both major elements of the urban proposition - the new parvis, the cathedral urban square edged with trees and seating, and the restated street promenade, formed between the Stadthaus and the existing shops that extend Hirschstrasse to Neue Strasse, framing vistas of the old town hall. These urban principles of cathedral square and pedestrian street are evident in the final project.

The linked main forms of the Stadthaus, the rotunda (an encircled cube) containing the public facilities for assembly and exhibition, and the wedge-shaped restaurant and cafe building also enclose an entry courtyard giving access to the square from the street. These two main forms are both contained by controlling lines arising within the site plan, including their alignment forming the new street.

The restaurant's east end responds to the north-south axis of the Platzgasse opposite on the square's northern frontage, while the stuccoed rotunda, centred on its masonry cube, provides the formal culmination and the essential turning movement into the square itself, from the major Hirschstrasse approach. At this point, the rotating dynamic form of the Stadthaus both signals and celebrates the magnificent vistas to the spire and mass of the minster, seen through and beyond its white layered colonnade and sliced brise-soleil wall planes.

Seen from the vast and magnificent space of the new cathedral square - site of busy markets and other local rituals - the architecture of the Stadthaus is strong enough to stand together with the soaring presence of the minster. The central cubic form of the Stadthaus, clad in the same Rosa Dante granite as the newly paved parvis, relates to the colour and nature of the cathedral masonry. The otherwise white stucco wrapping of the main form and its restaurant refers to local building tradition, and the tripartite glazed roofs of the attic galleries fuse with the gabled roofs of the surrounding postwar shopfronts.

In this project, the range of materials is very strictly limited - just granite, stucco and glass, and no other panel cladding. There is a local resonance in the brilliance and purity of the sharp white forms enclosing the precise granite and prismatic glass cube, that seems particularly appropriate and acceptable here in Ulm, the original home of the famous Hochschule fur Gestaltung. The abstraction and clarity of the whole ensemble appears to commemorate the legacy of this great German design tradition.

This austerity of form and finish continues within. The interior ground floor is paved in granite as the outer forecourt and the square. Exhibition spaces have wood-strip floors, with grey carpet in the assembly room, restaurant and offices, again with white stuccoed walls throughout.

The programme of uses is also essentially limited. The main entrance and tourist office, with characteristic curvilinear enquiry desk, supported by offices, act as a kind of visitor centre within the base of the cube. Below, the basement exhibition areas house a variety of historic artefacts from the site itself, including items from mass graves and partial footings of a Romanesque church. Above is the main assembly room - a wonderful contained space with splendid views of the cathedral beyond the main rostrum. Over and alongside this are areas for exhibition, either encircling the main staircase (there are no ramps in this project) or on the top floor of the cube. Both the five-floor stair-hall, voided through its full height, and the top-level gallery receive natural light from the eternally sun-shaded glazed roof which also affords magnificent views to the minster spire above. Given the quality of the galleries and the opening exhibition of work by Frank Stella, a matching curatorial ambition is now needed to sustain the overall potential the Stadthaus offers.

The restaurant with its upper gallery cafe is linked by an enclosed bridge at the assembly room level. The main ground level two-storey corner bay-window provides an especially spectacular vista upwards to the cathedral, and the tremendous success of the restaurant must owe much to its glorious setting and memorable interior space.

But the qualities that register most deeply are the openness of the whole design, with its variety of external granite paved roof terraces, and the ever-changing pattern of light in the main stair-hall whose complex spiralling spatiality, at times partially dissolved into whiteness, may recall Meier's memory of German Baroque architecture, epitomised in the Weiskirche.

At night the glowing interiors provide a reversed spectacle to the square. On the night of its inauguration, every level of the building including its roofs, and the square itself, were flooded with people enjoying the space and celebrating the spectacle - altogether an unforgettable urban event sponsored entirely by the building, its design and the urban space incorporating the cathedral.

Richard Meier's recent work - in particular at Ulm, as well as in Barcelona and the Hague - all exemplifies a way forward for city regeneration rounded on architecture formed within the framework of the urban site plan.

1 See Architectural review 1154 April 1993, pp22-37 'Interactive Languages': four European projects by Richard Meier.

2 Ibid.

3 Stephan Barthelmess develops the theme of urban building in his essay 'The Urbanization of Architecture' from Richard Meier: Stadthaus Ulm, published for the inauguration 11/93. International Creative Management, Niederstozingen 1993. ISBN 3-9803357-1-2.

4 Quotation from Artists Discussion with Frank Stella and Richard Meier, opening Programme of Stadhaus, Ulm, Germany, Saturday 13 November 1993.