Young Berlin based firm AFF Architekten won a competition for the adaptive reuse of the medieval Freudenstein castle in Freiberg. AFF, whose name refers to a non hierarchical work group, un¬derlining the members' belief that architecture is not the product of a single mastermind, are driven by their immense respect for existing buildings and their history, high aesthetic quality achieved through a low budget approach and an obsessively detailed familiarity with various materials and con¬struction principles.
The city of Freiberg boasts the world's oldest university of mining sciences, the Bergakademie, which was founded in 1765. Freudenstein Castle, which has dominated the cityscape for centuries, was chosen to be convert¬ed into a museum dedicated to local mining history.
The 6,000 square metre in¬stitution is made up of an archive and an exhibition space devoted to a large mineralogical collection. AFF's design left the castle largely untouched while adding a striking and contrasting structure that resembles a crystalline growth. The dominant motif determining the forms of the structure and some interior features is a room within a room, which the designers saw as analogous to the geological phenomenon known as a druse.
A druse is a rock cavity lined with a crust of projecting crystals, and its form suggested the forms of a number of architectural composi¬tions, from the building added to the courtyard to a series of severely canted interior walls. In the archive, old looking tubular windows have been extruded off the face of the building (resembling stereoscopic viewers) to provide light and views from the inside out and to articulate their purpose on the facade. The druse motif recurs in the gallery space but takes the form of smaller rooms that resemble gem cup¬boards containing various exhibi¬tion objects. Even the pavement in the courtyard, approaching the new faceted entrance building, is marked with the uneven but hard edged shapes of a metaphorical min¬eral rendered in white. The shapes gleam in their own reflections in the lobby’s polygonal storefront.
