Harmonious haven for Japanese art in the Rhineland
This exhibition house, initiated and donated by the collector Marianne Langen, is located on a former Nato base in the middle of the Lower Rhine countryside. From 1994, the collector Karl-Heinrich Müller developed a visionary project for this former rocket station, in which art and nature were brought together — a way to inscribe the location with new purpose without erasing its history. The Langen Foundation has three exhibition rooms, the result of two interconnected buildings. Housed in the ground-level concrete bar is the so-called Japan Room, an unusually long and narrow gallery designed by Tadao Ando as a space of meditative silence, especially suited for the Langen Collection’s Japanese artworks, nearly 350 ranging from the 12th to 20th century. Characteristic of many buildings by the Pritzker Prize winner is the visible structure of the installed formwork panels made of smoothed concrete, the use of glass and steel, reflecting pools and an integration with its surroundings.
Image: Troika, "Pink Noise" installation view, 2024, Langen Foundation, Neuss. Photo: Dirk Tacke
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