Langen Foundation 🎨

The Hombroich missile station is a former NATO missile station that was operated from 1967 to 1990. It is therefore not shown on any map. The art collector Karl-Heinrich Müller acquired the site in 1994 and designed it with sculptures, various buildings and remarkable garden designs. The concept was presented at the 6th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 1996 and was largely implemented in this way. The Langen Foundation Museum, which shows modern art on spacious exhibition areas, is also exceptional.

The area is worth a visit with its mixture of architecture, natural landscape and the remaining military buildings.

Langen Foundation near Neuss, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany is a museum designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The foundation showcases a collection of Oriental Art and Modern Art on the grounds of the Museum Insel Hombroich ( komoot.de/highlight/151065 ), a former NATO rocket base. The building has double-skin volume and two half-buried temporary exhibition wings with a total area of 900 m²; the structure mainly consists of reinforced concrete, glass and steel. The museum offers three exhibition spaces totalling an area of 1,300 m². Situated within the ground-level concrete slab is the so-called Japan Room – an unusually long and narrow gallery conceptualised by Ando as a space of “tranquillity” especially for the Japanese segment of the Langen Collection. The two subterranean exhibition rooms, with a ceiling height of a surprising eight metres, were in turn designed to accommodate the modern part of the collection.
Marianne Langen's collection of Japanese art, once mainly housed in Switzerland, consists of about 500 works dating from the 12th to the 19th century. Her husband, Viktor, who held several patents for technical innovations in automobile production, had traveled regularly to visit customers in Japan, where the couple's collection was formed. The Langen residencies in Meerbusch, Germany, (built by Georg Lünenborg, 1954/55) and Ascona, Switzerland, were full of paintings and sculptures that were periodically interchanged. The Langen's collection of modern art includes works from major artists such as Paul Cézanne, Max Beckmann, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, and Sigmar Polke. In addition, Viktor and Marianne Langen closely followed the Zero movement. Artists like Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker from the Langens’ Düsseldorf environment became part of the collection, as did Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein.
In 1979 the collectors erected a private museum in Ascona to house their collection of Japanese picture scrolls. Since 2004 the Langen Collection has been situated in the art and exhibition facility of the Langen Foundation. Marianne Langen, who paid weekly visits to the construction site, died in February 2004 without seeing the finished building. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langen_Foundation ; more: langenfoundation.de/en

Very nice photo opportunity, definitely worth seeing, even if it is a bit off the tour