La Congiunta – House for Sculptures

Every design for a museum is a project that affirms the distance between the built work ad the work of art while always recalling their mutuality. This is also true of La Congiunta, although it is not a museum in the usual sense, but a 'house' for selection o sculptures y Hans Josephson, endowed by a foundation that to give the public access to his work. This was an extraordinary undertaking, as few buildings for the arts in the twentieth century have placed themselves at the service of the work of a single sculptor. What arose was not a total work of art, but rather a work that reflects on the ways in which sculpture and architecture might define each other without glossing over the divide that, since Renaissance, has separated the two spheres. And this is the significance of the project. La Congiunta is a radical architectural meditation, an assertion that, at best, two sovereign works can encounter each other and achieve a correspondence based on a related stance. The building's plan is structured longitudinally. It presents a sequence of three main spaces of equal width, of which the second and te third have te same length. Four cells are attached laterally to the last of the rooms. The three main spaces are connected by doorless openings set along an a-centric axis. While each has its own height, they are all covered with the same steel roof section, carrying metal sheets as well as horizontal clerestorys of matt, translucent plastic. Only the four lateral cells are lit by centred zenithal skylights. All the walls are of reinforced concrete, část in situ, without any insulation. In term of services, the building possesses an electricity supply merely for a few neon lamps in the basement; there is no water, no heating system.

Peter Märkli