>I’m all at 6’s and 7’s over this.

This being Mainz’s new Kunsthalle (literally: art hall) which officially opened at the weekend and attracted throngs, including some rather inept avant-garde photographers to boot.

It’s just excellent.

The original power plant building for Mainz’s port and the adjacent locomotive depot have been gutted, renovated, reinvented as exhibition spaces/ cafe-restaurant-bar respectively and linked by a stunning glass tower with a 7º list to to starboard. (Has to be starboard, because the port’s the other way…).

Inside is pure white, which is initially disconcerting, but it provides curators with the blank canvas that some would surely kill for

But why 7º?

Why not 6º. Or 8º

Mailed the people who run the Kunsthalle.
Not a flicker.

Called them.
Not a clue (which surprises me, honestly)

But they did point me in the direction of the architect’s office in Berlin and as luck would have it, I got to speak to the architect hisself, Prof. Günter Zamp Kelp, and a very nice chat we had, too.

So it’s a prime number and one that’s steeped in mysticism. (Check out Wikipedia – it really is quite amazing. Did you know that 7 is the smallest positive multisyllabic integer?. Me neither. Useful stuff.).

I suggested that 8º (which not being prime and decidedly unmystic) would have been cool, given that Mainz lies on the intersection of the 50th and 8th parallels (sort of) and we got into a good-natured and lengthy discussion about the Tower of Pisa (given that my namesake and v.v.v.v distant relative stopped it form keeling over), the reasons for its tilting and architecture in general.

And then I said “It wouldn’t be that you chose 7º so that you could arrange the vertical and horizontal windows to form the letter 7, would it?” (Even more evident in their website)

An innocent, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth denial leads me to believe that that’s the true reason.

But nothing detracts from the fact that this a fine work of architectural design and a bold initiative to revitalise the port area.

Well done.

07 Mar This entry was published on 7 March, 2008 at 07:22. It’s filed under Culture, Mainz and tagged Architecture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.