Audience Award Winner
BNA Building of the Year 2024
Diederendirrix designed the museum extension for the Van Gogh Village Museum in Nuenen, in a characteristic village on a historic ribbon. The layered design refers in many ways to Van Gogh’s life and work in his Brabant period and is a carefully researched, contemporary interpretation of history.
Two small farms once stood in the clearing next to the town hall. The newly designed volume follows the historical parcellation and refers to the long-roofed farmhouses of yesteryear. The new museum building is a quirky variation on a traditional barn. The old barn doors reappear in a new variant in the entrance, which opens the building with a graceful arch to the other side of the street; the rectory of Van Gogh’s parents and the house next door, where his forbidden love lived.
The facade and roof of the new building form one seamless whole with a cladding of brown fired clay tiles – a reference to van Gogh’s predilection for earthy materials and tones. On the inside, the painters and plasterers worked on an incredibly large canvas, using materials expressive of the earthy tones characteristic of Vincent van Gogh’s Nuenen period.
Project partner: Van Eijk & Van der Lubbe
Photography: Ossip van Duivenbode
