While I am fixing the pictures taken from our June trip to Paris, we will continue with pictures of our Easter trip to Baden-Baden in the Black Forest. The earlier posts on Baden-Baden are here and here.

As usual, we were rushing around trying to catch as much as sights as possible on this trip to the Black Forest. After having gone up by a funicular to the summit of Merkur overlooking Baden-Baden, we came back to the city center and wandered in the direction of Lichtentaller Allee (Light Alley) – a 350 year old, 3 km walk along a river among the city’s parks. A white modern building can be seen situated next to a classical stone building joined by a connecting bridge.

The older neoclassical building is the Staatlichen Kunsthalle and the new one (on the left) is the Museum Freider Burda (which has a beautiful website, don’t miss it).

Museum Freider Burda, completed in 2004, is the work of Richard Meier – an architect famous in the 80’s.

He won the Pritzker prize in Architecture in 1984 with Los Angeles’s Getty center.

He is well known for using white materials and built with early to mid-century styles in spirit – think Le Corbusier.

Here in Baden-Baden, apparently much has been done to harmonize the new building next to the old museum and at the same time preserve the identities of the two buildings.

The interior has a ramp system that allows visitor to slowly ascend to the higher floors in the building.

Lots of natural light.

According to the museum website, the fascination of color and emotional expressive qualities of painting are the driving force behind the collector’s interest in art. Freider Burda is a locally-born, leading commercial printer and publisher in Europe.

We visited another one of Richard Meier’s white museum – the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona or MACBA). Here is a picture we took of it 2 years ago.

We like visiting museums. But sometimes the building is more interesting than the contents. Like a box of bonbon, the container is sometimes more attractive.

Is this the case with the Museum Freider Burda at Baden-Basen ? We never knew because we did not have enough time to see the exhibits – paintings by Matta Fiktionen. But there were some sculpture on the grounds to look at.

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