Peter Märkli: La Congiunta, Ticino, CH

The La Congiunta museum for Josephsohn’s works was designed by the architect Peter Märkli and has existed on the Ticino side of the Gotthard route since 1992. This very reduced concrete building was erected as a House for reliefs and half-figures by Hans Josephsohn and is thus explicitly intended to house a permanent exhibition of specific Josephsohn artworks.

Since its inauguration, 33 of Josephsohn’s works have been on display there – 3 large half-figures and 30 works from the reliefs category, which was a major impulse for Peter Märkli in developing his own way of dealing with architectural questions regarding volumes, proportions, spatial relationships as well as the presence of the human figure in the architecturally shaped space. The reliefs, allowing Josephsohn «the greatest artistic freedom», open up artistic spaces which enable the sculptor to depict several human, and sometimes sculptural, figures in various relationships to one another.

For many of his buildings, Peter Märkli has integrated such reliefs into his concept already in the first drafts – and sometimes even gone so far as to almost construct spaces around artworks by Josephsohn. The La Congiunta museum, which was built and is operated by a foundation of the same name, is the most impressive example for this approach, representing the actual marriage of sculpture and architecture. Peter Märkli used elementary means to enact the dialog between the architecture and the artworks: spatial proportions, light direction, and the surfaces of the raw concrete walls. In 1995, the building was awarded a price in the Neues Bauen in den Alpen competition and has belonged to the most important pieces of Swiss museum architecture ever since.

The key for La Congiunta can be collected at the Osteria on the main street in the center of the Giornico village.
Osteria Giornico, 6745 Giornico/Ticino, +41 91 864 22 15.

(text source: https://www.kesselhaus-josephsohn.ch)