Works News Office
Name:Bonnier Art Gallery
Type:Culture/Public
Location:Stockholm, Sweden
Year:2006
Addition to the headquarters of the Bonnier Publishing House, Bonnierhuset.

The original building is a straw coloured brick complex from the 1940-ies with a 20-floor highrise tower as its focus. The site is a triangular terrace dramatically positioned and overlooking the railway tracks and a waterway very close to the city centre.
The main volume of the new building is located at the south-eastern tip of the terrace and is separated from the brick complex. This separation is created by a gap which brings down light to the street and makes possible a visual contact across the complex with the part of the town (Kungsholmen) on the other side of the waterway. The separation of the old and the new also gives more possibilities to the new facades that are meant to contrast to, rather than to imitate the existing masonry. Though as a volume the new building carefully follows the edges of the site and the indications in the existing complex. This is particularly evident in the curved facade facing Torsgatan where the new building echoes the curve in the brick structure west of the highrise building.
The main volume of he new building sits on a one-storey “socle” which contains the Art gallery for temporary exhibitions at street level.
The exhibition spaces of the Art gallery are organised as rectangular overlit “boxes” in the wedge shaped building. Due to numerous restricting preconditions (the building sits on 3 existing floors of offices overlooking the railway lines) the distribution of the exhibition has primary large rectangular boxes that coexists with small, narrow and odd, interstitious spaces that are equally used for presenting art works.
There is no definite hierarcy between the major and the minor spaces, nor is there a division between lounge, cafe and exibition spaces.

Published:
A+U, Architecture and Urbanism, Tokyo, july 2001.
Arkitektur, Stockholm, no 4, 2006.
A 10, Amsterdam no 9, 2006
Login - All contents © Celsing