HIMACS: Handel House

The legendary composer Georg Friedrich Handel now has a permanent exhibition dedicated to his musical legacy in his birth town of Halle an der Saale in Germany. This was recently refurbished by the Berlin based architectsGerhards & Gluecker, who choose HIMACS in Arctic White to add both gravitas and panache to the project.

The exhibition architecture focuses on the typology and atmosphere of the Baroque house – transported to the here and now. The museum design is sensitive to the small-scale structure of the House and enters into a creative dialogue with it. The dominant stylistic device of the Baroque, the play of light and shadow, has been reinterpreted through the use of the HIMACS solid-surface material. The themed room "Under the Arcadian Sun" is exemplary of this skilful implementation. Handel’s four-year sojourn in Italy and the intimate pieces of chamber music that he wrote during this period are here symbolised through a delicate arch construction made of HIMACS. A floral pattern, whose precise perforation appears to be playful, has been milled in acrylic stone by the manufacturer Möbel Damm, trained by Klöpfer Surfaces, the distribution partner of HIMACS. This ‘curved pergola’, as it is referred to by the architects, stands detached from the walls in the room, so that it casts shadows and contains interactive items documenting the life of the artist. The interpretation of Baroque ornamentation in the architectural language of the 21st century allows itself to be skilfully realised through the selection of the modern material. Because HIMACS uses its universal properties - such as optical seamless processing, thermoforming, simple processing, robustness coupled with a warm feel and, last but not least, the clean and simple milling – to enable a new interpretation of Baroque aesthetics.

Their concept of an outstanding architectural design for exhibitions has brought success to the architects, as evidenced by the multiple awards for work, including famous prizes such as the iF communication design award (2010),best architects (2011), DDC Gute Gestaltung [DDC Good Design] (2011) and the nomination for the German Design Award (2012).