Photo: Peter M. Mayr

The moving art museum

The rotating bronze disc above the entrance door entices visitors to enter a very special universe set against the backdrop of an architecturally and technically singular design concept eyed with great interest by students and architects from all over the world. Visitors find themselves in a unique gallery for contemporary jewellery art which has gained international renown. "The architecture attracts customers, inducing them to come in", says Renate Slavik. 15 years ago, Tomas Hoke personally created and furnished the interior of the gallery within just six months in cooperation with his brother, architect Edmund Hoke. "It was an experiment" he admits. At the beginning there were some doubts as to whether the works exhibited and the innovative presentation concept would compete with one another to the detriment of both. But in the end the two worlds blended into a perfect Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art without equal or equivalent in terms of either its architecture or the jewellery on show. Projecting through the door into the street, a steel girder, slightly curved to reflect the structure of the old, historically important listed building, extends right across the gallery premises. The exhibits are showcased in glass cabinets suspended from this steel girder, equipped with a sophisticated and hitherto uncopied sliding-door mechanism. Good old railway technology served as a model, with a tramway type overhead electrification system permitting perfect illumination of the exhibits regardless of how they are displayed. Like in a shunting yard, each of the glass showcases can be moved along the girder and the wall frames to create space for events if required. This mobile, suspended architectural engineering was a challenge for the Hoke brothers. Since nothing could be bought off the peg, the prototypes themselves were installed, and they still retain their innovative relevance even after all these years. Turning to the aesthetic concept, Hoke explains: "Jewellery is essentially made of metallic materials, so we used glass as well as mirrors, which reflect the light across the angles and create brilliant flashes on the edges. We needed metal for the framework structure, of course, but we gave it a painted finish." There are, however, a few points of discontent. The one or other detail, like the archive situation, for example, would be solved differently today. Although only one or two fitments have been added subsequently, it is these little changes that keep the "museum with purchase option" in constant motion. And the bronze disc continues to rotate.