Garbizu Collar . Pitarch

Textilmuseum . St. Gallen

Garbizu Collar Architecture . Pedro Pitarch Architectures and Urbanisms

The “Palazzo Rosso” was built in 1886 as the museum for industry and craftsmanship, supported by the strong textile industry of the moment in the city of St. Gallen. Since then, the building has been working as the textile museum and library. In a way of providing the building with better exhibition space conditions, the museum launched a brief competition to propose an extension on the existing roof of the building.

VORHANG AUF!

Our first approach was to understand the programmatic function of the building, in order to combine the new proposal with a better and more interesting visiting experience through the museum. Therefore, we propose an alternative entrance to the Palazzo. A more urban entrance through the new cafeteria, opening it to the street and offering this piece of the building to the city. This entrance room with its six meters’ height presents a more interesting welcoming experience than the original entrance. This room leads at the same time to the new core, which enables a direct connection with the extension on the roof. Giving the possibility to this new space to work completely independent from the rest of the museum.

We wanted to understand this space not only as part of the exhibition but also as a multifunctional space, a public “Plaza” open to the sharp roofs of St. Gallen. This 800 m2 space is designed as a black-box, with the necessary equipment to function as exhibition. At the same time, the facade of the new volume works as a textile membrane, covering it and providing the possibility of opening the space to the city.

This textile facade does not have a predefined form, it keeps changing all the time depending on the use of the space. The shapes of the facade are given by the natural forms of gravity, which at the same time generate a dialogue with the original openings of the “palazzo”.
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