The Türkentor is the last remaining fragment of a barracks built in the 1820s on Türkenstraße in Munich. Preserved as a memento after the building itself had been damaged in wartime and demolished in the 1970s, the former entrance portal had long been awaiting a new urban role. In conjunction with the construction of the Brandhorst Museum, it was given an active part to play in the Munich Museum Quarter when it was selected as the permanent home of Walter De Maria’s Large Red Sphere.

De Maria’s art piece of polished red granite belongs to a series of related works in Paris and on the Japanese museum island of Naoshima. In Munich, a specific quality arises from its relationship to the historical building fragment, which lies exactly on axis with the Klenze portal of the Alte Pinakothek. Working in close cooperation with the artist, the Türkentor’s neoclassical street façade was retained and repaired, while the rest of the fragment – which was in a ruinous state – was protected and extended, in part with a new brick skin. Between this skin and the old wall at the rear, a narrow entrance space was inserted. Here, an arched window visually links the installation and the Museum Quarter.

Inside, the perfect archetypal form of the artist’s reflective stone sphere is set against the eroded surfaces of the ‘as found’ structure. The interior receives natural lighting through square openings above and to the side of the sphere, while a continuous clerestory brings out the sculptural quality of the enclosing brick walls. Art and architecture are attuned so as to create a place of peace and meditative solemnity.