MCBA - The Museum of Fine Arts of the Canton of Vaud, of which Lausanne is the capital, has been in need of a new building since the beginning of this century. In Switzerland, large projects with a state budget are approved in referendums, which does not always end well for interesting architectural ideas. Therefore, in 2008, citizens were asked to decide whether to build an MCBA building on the shores of Lake Geneva, and they answered in the negative. As it turned out later, because this lake in the public mind is too valuable a landscape. The second option for the location of the museum - closer to the historical core of Lausanne, next to the central station, did not raise any objections.
This is how the Platform 10 quarter began to form there: the Barcelona office Barozzi Veiga,
laureate of the Mies van der Rohe Prize, won the 2011 competition with her own plan for this art cluster. At the same time, these architects won the right to design a new building for the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts. The difficulty was that at the chosen location there was a depot built in 1911, which could be demolished and preserved. Barozzi Veiga chose the dismantling route, which gave them more design freedom and ultimately won the competition.
As a result, only the end of the “sleeve” remained from the depot, which protrudes from the wall of the museum facing the railway tracks. The laconic rectangular volume of the MCBA, conceived by Barozzi Veiga, is a reference to the industrial past (and present) of the site, and nowhere is it more pronounced than from this south side. But a monolithic surface is also a utilitarian response to the noise and vibration of trains, as well as the possibility of an accident involving a train carrying an explosive chemical cargo. Another consideration was to protect the exposure from the sun's rays from the south.
The same monolithic ends differ only in that on the eastern facade, which meets visitors coming from the station, the relief repeats the silhouette of another "arm" of the depot. Only from the north facing the city center does the museum appear more open: with deep lamellas, which, like the rest of the outer surfaces of the building, are covered with light gray clinker - another reminder of the industrial context.
The entrance to the imposing building (145.5 x 21.5 x 22 m, area - 12 449 m2) is deliberately modest, hidden in a concrete "cover" in order to contrast with the spacious vestibule, ending with an arched window under a cylindrical vault: thus " sleeve "depot, which is visible from the windows of the trains.
The first floor houses an auditorium, a cafe, a museum shop, exhibition halls, which continue on the second and third levels. The lobby and the main staircase divide the building into two unequal parts in height, which helps to organize several exhibitions at the same time, although the option of a single exposition is also possible. The windows on the north facade, as well as the skylights in the ceilings, provide the halls with natural light through a variety of filters. The budget for the project as a whole is 84.5 million francs, of which the building costs amounted to 64,715,000 francs.
Already at the end of 2021, Platform 10 will become home to two other Lausanne museums: the Champs Elysees and the decorative arts.
The building for them is being built according to the project of the Portuguese brothers-architects Irish-Mateus.
