Page 19 - Studio International - September 1965

View of the exhib1t1on "Masterpieces
of Sculpture· July-August 1964
Left to right are works by Couzijn,
Urteil. Etienne-Martin. Dodeigne.
Freundlich. Hoflener and Guerrini.

yard. the supporting columns were arranged. The behind me, I believe I may say that the concept of the
underlying idea for the plan of the Brussels building open-plan exhibition hall has stood the test. As far as
was for the ground-floor to be an open space for the I know, it is based on a project of Otto Wagner's for the
exhibition of items symbolic of Austrian economic life. Vienna Technical Museum. It is significant that
with the cultural section of the exhibition housed on Wagner, while approving of the open-spaced room for
the first floor in a room without an opening to the technical objects which he believed to be immune
outside. However, the necessity arose for making use from changes of style, took great care, in his design for
also of the ground-floor as part of the museum by a 'Gallery of Art of Our Time', to give its own space to
incorporating the lower open space and remodelling it each stage of development. By now the work of art
into a closed precinct. This was achieved by covering had lost more and more of its decorative character as
the open courtyard with a glass roof on a level with the an ornamental wall-hanging. A picture is no longer a
ceiling of the second floor. On the ground-floor, the sectional reprodl,Jctio17 of an optical empirical reality
enclosure was effected partly by the use of glass walls, but the discovery of a new artistic truth. Therefore it
partly by solid partitions, thus allowing a greater can be considered as an autonomous image, a thing in
concentration of space. The glass was necessary both itself. Consequently, as an exhibit, a picture dominates
for letting in light and for creating a close relationship its surrounding, it becomes three-dimensional, related
with the exterior, especially with the sculpture courts to sculpture. The latter is no longer an expletive filling
and the garden. This arrangement resulted in trans­ an interval left by pictorial art. All these considerations
forming the interior courtyard, now covered by a roof, are taken into account in the open-plan type gallery
into a large one-room space·. with its movable and exchangeable elem�nts on th�
With the experience of twenty temporary exhibitions ground-floor (where the temporary exhibitions ·take
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