Rather than a sealed box for art, Peter Zumthor gives the Fondation Beyeler a spiralling, side-lit museum plus a pavilion and gate house, three buildings set into a park in Riehen, on the edge of Basel.
The Fondation Beyeler asked for more room and got a settlement. An invited design study chose Atelier Peter Zumthor, whose plan split the brief rather than stacking it: a museum for the collection, a pavilion for events, a service house for art logistics, each dropped into the park in Riehen, on the edge of Basel. Renzo Piano’s 1997 glass building keeps the temporary shows. Zumthor wanted a museum that served only art, so everything else moved out.
The Wyss Museum is a compact three-storey volume of pale rammed concrete, its shell broken by a few openings. In plan it reads as a skewed Y, three wings whose footprint was set to spare an old ginkgo. The Y repeats on every floor, each wing lit by one side window pushed to a wall edge, leaving the largest wall free for art. Visitors climb from the street through the galleries to a roof terrace, then descend to the park by stairs hidden between an inner and outer wall. “It’s one big spiral,” Zumthor said.
Light drives the scheme. Piano’s galleries are top-lit; Zumthor cut his windows into the walls instead. “Top lights can often be very harsh. They have less soul,” he said in an interview published by the Fondation Beyeler. The openings sit in wide frames of dark bronze, set so far back from the white plaster that the wall becomes a niche; on the first upper floor a double window gains a parapet and bench. Jura limestone binds it all, worked into the concrete, the lime plaster, the terrazzo floors and benches.
There is no foyer. The ticket desk sits in a stained-oak recess beside the first hall, so the collection begins a step past the door. At the opening, Monet’s water lilies stretch along a ground-floor wall, Roni Horn’s glass pieces sit nearby, and in the park Louise Bourgeois’s spider Maman and Calder’s The Tree stand among the trees. The critic Fabian Peters warns that walls this wide can shrink a painting to a stamp, unless it runs at the scale of those Monets.
The two smaller buildings work by contrast. The Ammann Pavilion keeps to one storey, a public lounge by day and a room for concerts and talks; irregular in plan, laid up in rubble masonry against the old park wall, glazed toward the garden. Inside run warm woods, cherry parquet, pear and maple, with stepped seating flanking a sunken stage; a concert hall, Zumthor reasons, should never feel cold. The Erlen Torhaus raises a grid of wood and glass over a timber-clad base, holding art logistics and offices, linked underground to the museum.
What binds the three is the ground. A once-private park is now open, the grounds nearly doubled; Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten restored both gardens, which meet the Landschaftspark Wiese reserve. The buildings recede so the landscape leads, the point Zumthor returns to: “Here, art doesn’t compete with the landscape; the two work together.” Opened in stages from autumn 2026 with «Constellations», it reads less like an annex than the villa this park lost, given back in stone.
