Museum of Modern Literature, Literary museum at Marbach am Neckar, Germany
The Museum of Modern Literature is a literary museum on a rocky plateau at the edge of Marbach am Neckar's town park, next to the Schiller National Museum. The building by architect David Chipperfield is made up of pale concrete rooms, some set into the hillside, lit partly by skylights.
The museum was designed between 2002 and 2006 by David Chipperfield Architects, with Alexander Schwarz as project architect, and built by Leonard Weiss GmbH at a cost of €10 million. The building was handed over on 9 January 2006 and officially opened on 6 June 2006 in the presence of Federal President Horst Köhler. It won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2007.
The galleries display handwritten drafts, letters, and notebooks from writers such as Kafka, Döblin, and Celan in rooms designed to make reading easy. Seeing the crossed-out lines and personal notes on original pages gives a direct sense of how these writers actually worked.
The museum sits on a hill above Marbach am Neckar's old town and can be reached on foot from the train station in about 15 to 20 minutes. Inside, the building is step-free and the exhibition rooms are clearly labeled.
The museum's facade is a row of tall, slender concrete fins with glass and brown wood paneling behind them, standing on a light gray concrete base. In front, a low wall of light gray rectangular blocks encloses a recessed area. The building won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2007.
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