Atelier Peter Zumthor’s expansion of the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen distributes museum galleries, public events, and art logistics across three buildings set within a restored nineteenth-century landscape garden. The intervention extends the existing museum campus toward the Landschaftspark Wiese nature reserve while treating the park, its mature trees, and its historic structures as active components of the architectural sequence.
The Expanded Ensemble of the Fondation Beyeler Technical Information
- ArchitectsAtelier Peter Zumthor
- LocationBaselstrasse 101, Riehen, Switzerland
- Gross Area26,500 m2 | 285,245 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2016 – 2026
- Photographs© Iwan Baan, © Mark Niedermann, © Katalin Deér, © Sabine Hess, © Stefan Altenburger, © Martin Mischkulnig
If we carefully construct in response to the landscape, if we genuinely see it as it is, then the building we design naturally recedes in importance.
– Peter Zumthor
An Ensemble Rather Than a Single Extension
The expansion rejects the conventional model of the museum addition as a single, consolidated volume. Rather than enlarging Renzo Piano’s 1997 museum building, whose long porphyry walls and glazed roof were calibrated to bring controlled zenithal light onto the collection, Zumthor leaves the original gallery intact and divides the new program among the Wyss Museum, the Ammann Pavilion, and the Erlen Torhaus. This separation assigns distinct spatial and operational roles to each structure: galleries occupy the stone museum building, public events take place in the low pavilion, and the gatehouse houses collection handling and workspaces. The decision reduces the physical pressure placed on the historic park while making circulation through the grounds part of the institutional experience.
Each building establishes a different address within the site. The Wyss Museum is embedded among mature trees and operates as a dense, inwardly focused volume. The Ammann Pavilion follows the park wall and opens laterally onto lawn and garden. The Erlen Torhaus faces the edge between village fabric and landscape, giving the practical requirements of loading, storage, and staff work an urban presence without bringing them into the gallery sequence. An underground connection between the Torhaus and museum separates art logistics from visitor movement.
Between these elements, a new forecourt acts less as an entrance plaza than as a small civic room. Asphalt with basalt chippings forms a durable ground plane, while gates, rendered walls, and the surrounding buildings define its perimeter. A Jura limestone trough fountain introduces a deliberately ordinary public use: drinking, pausing, and meeting. The square connects the museum grounds to paths leading from the nature reserve and recalls the former course of the village stream, turning an infrastructural trace into a spatial ordering device.
The Wyss Museum: Landscape-Shaped Galleries
The three-story Wyss Museum takes an irregular Y-shaped plan from the position of existing vegetation rather than imposing a regular footprint on the park. A ginkgo, a redwood, and groups of plane trees remain close to the exterior walls, producing a building whose stepped massing appears compressed between trunks and canopies. Its form is therefore not simply sculptural. The plan registers protected trees as permanent constraints, with galleries, entrances, terraces, and exterior paths adjusted around their root zones and visual presence.
Inside, the museum replaces the corridor-and-room logic of many gallery buildings with a gradual ascending route. Visitors enter at a lower level and move upward through an open sequence of rooms, broad thresholds, and stair landings. This spiral-like progression allows exhibition spaces to retain individual proportions without becoming isolated chambers. Views across adjacent galleries create curatorial continuity, while the route repeatedly reorients visitors toward the garden, the village roofscape, and the wider landscape beyond Riehen.
Side lighting is central to this spatial strategy. Large windows in slender bronze frames are deeply recessed within the heavy walls, producing framed views rather than continuous transparency. Window seats and low benches turn several openings into places of occupation, allowing the park to be observed independently of the displayed works. The galleries remain primarily white-walled rooms for art, yet their daylight conditions resist the sealed neutrality of the conventional exhibition box. Landscape becomes a changing visual register, affected by season, weather, and the movement of people outside.
Material Continuity and Architectural Character
Jura limestone gives the Wyss Museum a material coherence across scales and assemblies. The stone appears as aggregate in the rammed-concrete facade, as inlays in cast terrazzo floors, as mineral content within interior finishes, and as solid elements in benches, stairs, and terrace parapets. Rather than treating stone as surface cladding, the project deploys it in progressively processed forms. Raw aggregate, polished floor, lime plaster, and carved seating establish a family of related textures while distinguishing structural mass from the tactile points of contact used by visitors.
The rammed-concrete envelope has a layered, sedimentary appearance. Pale yellow-grey lifts alternate with darker seams left by compaction, and slight deviations in the horizontal courses reveal the work of manual construction. Small triangular recesses puncture selected upper wall areas, introducing a fine-grained pattern that is visible only at close range. This articulation prevents the building from reading as an abstract mineral block. Its monolithic character is sustained, but the facade also records duration, labor, and the incremental process of building a wall.
The other two new structures establish a materially lighter counterpoint. The Ammann Pavilion uses varnished oak framing and extensive glazing beneath a shallow roof, presenting itself as a permeable edge to the park. Its interior combines cherrywood parquet, pearwood wall surfaces, and a carefully tuned acoustic ceiling. The Erlen Torhaus similarly uses oak and glass, though its regular timber frame and more closed delivery level give it the character of a working outbuilding. The contrast between the heavy, side-lit museum and the timber-framed ancillary buildings makes material correspond directly to program, permanence, and degree of public openness.
Park Restoration and New Cultural Programs
The expansion nearly doubles the publicly accessible park area by opening a previously private nineteenth-century garden. Both sections were originally laid out as English landscape gardens, and their restoration retains the existing hierarchy of meadow, pond, wooded enclosure, and open lawn. Mature trees remain the dominant spatial structure, while new paths clarify connections between the historic museum, the new buildings, and the adjacent Landschaftspark Wiese nature reserve. The park is not treated as residual scenery around architectural objects. It is the principal field through which the ensemble is encountered.
Landscape interventions support both ecological continuity and public occupation. Ponds, species-rich meadow areas, woodland edges, and planted clearings provide habitat for insects, birds, and bats while also establishing varied microclimates and degrees of visibility. Outdoor artworks are distributed through these settings rather than concentrated in a formal sculpture garden, making the visitor aware of changing ground conditions, seasonal vegetation, and long views. A narrow bridge across the pond adds another measured crossing within this sequence, linking the experience of art to the physical rhythms of water, path, and canopy.
The restored historic structures broaden the ensemble beyond exhibition galleries. The Orangerie returns to its horticultural function through a greenhouse and plant-oriented interior, where the exposed timber roof structure and retained concrete floor remain visible. The Ammann Atelier expands spaces for workshops and collective making, while the Salon introduces a small listening room defined by a timber acoustic ceiling, record shelving, and concentrated seating. Together with the compact Folly exhibition space, these adaptations distribute cultural activity across buildings of different scales, allowing education, music, botany, informal gathering, and experimental display to occupy the same landscape without being absorbed into the museum proper.
About Atelier Peter Zumthor
Atelier Peter Zumthor is based in Haldenstein, Switzerland, where Peter Zumthor works with around two dozen employees. The studio designs original architectural works through a close engagement with place, landscape, material, and spatial experience.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Schnetzer Puskas Ingenieure, Basel; Rapp, Basel
- MEP consultants: Waldhauser + Hermann, Munchenstein, HVAC-R; Probst + Wieland, Burgdorf, plumbing engineering; PZM, Lucerne, electrical engineering; Refcon, Glattbrugg, cooling engineering
- Landscape designers: Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten, Zürich
- Client: Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Beyeler Museum AG, Basel
- Other contributors: Rapp Architekten, Munchenstein, overall project management and construction management; Lauber Ingenieure, Lucerne, timber engineering; BWS Bauphysik, Winterthur, building physics; Ehrsam Bauphysik, Pratteln, building physics; planbar, Zurich, foodservice planning; Mati Lichtgestaltung, Adliswil, lighting design; Lichterloh, Munchenstein, lighting design; Isometrix Lighting Design, London, lighting design; Institut fur Tageslichttechnik, Stuttgart, daylight design; HKG Consulting, Aarau, security and fire safety planning; Rapp, Basel, utility planning; Muller-BBM, Planegg, acoustics; Gruner, Oberwil, flood protection; WSDG, Basel, event technology; Forsberg Architekten, Basel, architecture for the Studios and Salon; Interiorirossi, Basel, interior design for the Studios and Salon; India Mahdavi, Paris, interior design for the Orangerie; Plan Philippe, Munchenstein, project management and construction management for the Studios and Salon; Gabriel Heusser, Basel, project management and construction management for the Orangerie; TEILE, Salon sound system
