Ark Rival

Olson Kundig’s environmental haven for Berlin’s Kindermuseum.

- Sophie Lovell

Olson Kundig Architects, founded in Seattle in 1967, has designed all types of buildings, including a number of West Coast cultural institutions, such as the Skirball Cultural Center in LA, and the Frye Art Museum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, both in Seattle, as well as the Kirkland Museum in Denver. In 2016, it won a competition to design the Kindermuseum (Children’s Museum) annex for the Jewish Museum Berlin, its first museum project outside the US.

The biggest ask in the brief for the Kindermuseum, due to open in 2020, is that it had to be constructed inside another building – a rectangular, 2,700 sq m 1960s flower market. It also had to fit into a building ensemble that has, so far, been dominated by the singular design vision of the architect Daniel Libeskind.

The zigzagging, metal-clad, deconstructivist mass of his Jewish Museum, designed in 2001, is one of Berlin’s most distinctive landmarks. In 2012, across the street, Libeskind converted part of the flower market building that the Kindermuseum now shares to house the Jewish Museum’s W Michael Blumenthal Academy. So the front half of the former market structure is dominated by his acute-angled encrustations and interventions, while the entrance is a riven tilted cube half-sunk into the ground.