This is the second building in the new "Museum Quarter" - its foundation was laid by the Pinakothek of Contemporary Art by Stefan Braunfels, and the master plan of the entire complex belongs to the same architect. According to his plan, to the long side of the rectangular block of the Pinakothek, four more museums should line up with their ends, each of which will get a narrow strip of land approx. 100 m. Of particular difficulty is the definition of the main facade of any of these four buildings: due to the inconvenient configuration of the site, can it be only end, but facing the city or the Pinakothek?
The architects turned the Brandhorst Museum (the first of four buildings) to face the city, turning its "head" there - a block wider and taller than the rest of the building (in the plan it resembles a mirrored letter G). The surrounding neighborhoods have preserved 19th-century buildings, and the 1950s Zep Ruf apartment building is located directly opposite the Brandhorst Museum. Such an environment required discretion in the design of the facade, and the "Sauerbruch Hatton" is characterized by bright, colorful buildings. The way out was the use of very bright components (porous metal panels of blue and red colors, on which multicolored glazed ceramic tubes are fixed on the outside), which acquire an almost pastel color when viewed from a distance: so the colors of the spectrum, merging together, form a white color. But such a restrained version was used only for the "head" of the building: its main volume, an elongated block 18 m wide, is painted more intensely: in the lower part, which hides the galleries of the second level (the first tier of the halls is underground), shades of red prevail, the upper one - maximally polychrome. A total of 36,000 rods in 23 different colors were used for the facades of the building.
The interior space, on the other hand, is almost monochrome - white walls and light oak parquet; a wide staircase is also sheathed with wood, connecting the three tiers of the museum's galleries. To free up the area of the walls for hanging work, it was decided to almost completely abandon the windows. At the same time, even many halls of the underground tier receive natural light through a system of reflectors directing it into the interior from glazing strips equipped with fabric filters that run at the junction of walls and ceilings.
The premises in the “head” building are somewhat different from the others: on the ground level there is a glazed lobby with a cafe, in the underground tier there is the largest museum hall with an area of 460 m2, and on the second floor there is a hall with a rounded wall like a diorama: it is intended for a pearl. Brandhorst collection - 12 canvases of the Lepanto series by Saya Tuombly. With such a hanging, the viewer will be able to cover them all at one glance. In total, the museum's collection contains more than 700 works of contemporary art, including works by Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst. Due to the modest size of the museum building, it will be possible to exhibit less than a quarter of the collection at a time.
