The hills are alive

摘要

The three glass "hills" of Renzo Piano's impressive new art centre nestle so comfortably in the bucolic Alpine greenery outside Bern that they seem almost to be part of the landscape. Mr Piano has tied the building's undulating forms to a central spine to celebrate the multidisciplin-ary work of Paul Klee, the city's most famous artist, who died in 1940. Klee struggled over whether he should become a painter or a violinist, and he played with amateur ensembles for most of his life. Fittingly, there is a concert hall in one of Mr Piano's hills and the centre has a resident ensemble. Another hill houses a massive archive, while the central hill presents a rotating display of Klee's art drawn from the centre's collection of over 4,000 works. On its lower level is a space for temporary exhibitions by Klee's contemporaries, such as Kandinsky's Blaue Reiter group and the Bauhaus.