Haus der Kunst occupies a building designed in 1937 for the Nazi regime's exhibition of officially approved art — a massive Neoclassical structure intended to celebrate German art and exclude everything else. The building's history is part of its function now: the institution has spent decades in deliberate tension with what the architecture was designed to represent, programming international contemporary art of the kind the original exhibitions were designed to prevent. The programme is ambitious and often demanding, running large monographic shows alongside interdisciplinary projects that use the building's scale. The café interior retains period decorative elements — including the vintage cartographic murals and the original proportions — which makes it one of Munich's more atmospheric rooms for a slow afternoon. The English Garden is across the road.
Lehel, Munich, Germany