Stuttgart’s Neue Staatsgalerie, or the Collapse of Clasicism

Abstract

Stuttgart’s Neue Staatsgalerie, designed by James Stirling, proposes a diversity of itineraries characterized by their unpredictability, their fragmentation, their continual contradiction of the visitor’s expectations. The sense of time that emerges when experiencing this architecture is discontinuous, random and uncertain, reflecting our contemporary condition. Examining this museum using the approaches of the philosophers Husserl or Ricoeur sheds new light on these issues.