The Tadeusz Pavilion, four by four room by Erwin Heerich, Insel Hombroich, Neuss, Germany, 2025

‘Passing through the formative processes of nature and then stepping into the buildings, you will find the specifically human power of design – that is, art.’
Erwin Heerich

Upon the suggestion of the founder of Stiftung Insel Hombroich, the sculptor and draughtsman Erwin Heerich (1922–2004) translated his terse geometric sculptural and drawn works into the architectural plane. Ten walk-in sculptures came about as museum buildings for Museum Insel Hombroich, with an exterior of reclaimed hand-made, fired Dutch brick. The upper part of the Tadeusz Pavilion, named after the painter Norbert Tadeusz, houses my favorite room which is usually kept empty as it’s perfect in itself. Emptiness fills the space while the space is empty.

For more than thirty years a unique cultural location of international significance has been evolving between Düsseldorf and Cologne, near the city of Neuss. Hombroich is a museum, an artists’ workplace and a landscape, a place for architecture and for events in art, literature, philosophy and music all in one.
The Museum Insel Hombroich was opened in 1987 as a realisation of the collector Karl-Heinrich Müller’s concept of art in parallel to nature in an ideal museum and landscape space. The pavilions house his significant collection of art and artefacts spanning two thousand years, with the emphasis on the Modern period.

To me personnaly The Tadeusz Pavilion encompasses everything architecture should be.

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The Langen Foundation by architect Tadao Ando, Hombroich, Neuss, Germanany, 2025

The exhibition building initiated and endowed by the collector Marianne Langen is situated on a former NATO base amidst a swath of Lower Rhine landscape. The collector Karl-Heinrich Müller developed a visionary project for these grounds in 1994, aiming to coalesce art and nature to form a unique synthesis.

The exhibition venue is assembled from two interconnected building tracts of respectively different architectural nature. Abutting the elongated concrete slab veiled in glass at a forty-five-degree angle is the main building tract, which is comprised of two parallel cubes that are entrenched nearly six metres deep into the ground. Running between the two tracts is a large open stairwell resembling a stairway to heaven, leading from the depths back up into nature.

The Langen Foundation offers three exhibition spaces totalling an area of 1,300 square metres. Situated within the ground-level concrete slab is the so-called Japan Room – an unusually long and narrow gallery conceptualised by architect Tadao Ando as a space of “tranquillity” especially for the Japanese segment of the Langen Collection. The two subterranean exhibition rooms, with a ceiling height of a surprising eight metres, were in turn designed to accommodate the modern part of the collection.

Characteristic for many of the buildings designed by this Pritzker awardee is the visible structure of the installed formwork panel of smoothed concrete, which is oriented to the size of the Tatami mats and, together with the holes of the formwork anchors, yields a distinctive visage. In the Langen Foundation building these structures are consistently visible, even from the inside in places.

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My dear mother (aged 82), Museum Langen Fondation, Neuss, Germany, 2023.

None of us know how much time we have but, interestingly, time is relative, depending on its observer rather than an immutably fixed constant everywhere in the universe. Our perception of time is especially influenced by our own perspective: Are we living in the moment or looking backward on time? It’s also influenced by our memory of past experiences. As we get older the rate at which we process experiences slows down and thus time seems to “speed up”. The many and often new things young children have to do in a day contribute to their notion that time is more plentiful. Therefore, when looking back, time may feel slower. This can apply to adults, too. When we look back on a time period that was filled with lots of new and exciting things we see a large expense of events and memories. They make it seem like time stretches out. Looking back on fewer moments that have past, the less rich your own representation is, the more it’s going to seem like time went by quickly. Thus, how we process what we experience and see influences how we view time. Not introducing new patterns into your life, can make you feel like time is going by much quicker overall.

The whole concept of “time being of value” only has meaning for living, breathing, thinking and feeling beings. Afterall, a universe with nothing living in it would have nothing of value in it because there would be nothing to appreciate that value itself. Hence, life is the sufficient and necessary condition for anything of value. I think the trick is to make life an adventure - be it in your imagination, in real life or both - not tedious and unimaginative.

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