Extension Prinzhorn Collection

The Prinzhorn Collection is an internationally renowned museum. At an early date, it recognized the high artistic quality of works produced in psychiatric clinics and to this day researches and preserves them, while also showcasing them in changing exhibitions. The collection of historical works is still supplemented with pieces by psychiatric patients today.

Since 2001, the collection has been housed in a converted lecture theater on the grounds of the old university teaching hospital, but in recent years exhibition space requirements have become increasingly complex. To enable museum operations commensurate with the collection, the old building needed to be modernized and expanded.

The collection is of exceptional interest to the IBA because it plays a quite unprecedented productive role in the Heidelberg Knowledge City: As a museum institution with a strong public profile, it contributes to the perception of the campus and strengthens interfacing within the quarter. With its extraordinary collection, it presents testimony to borderline experiences between the purportedly normal and forms of behavior that depart from it. An expansion of the Prinzhorn Collection offers an opportunity with a more comprehensive program to kindle dialog with civic society and representatives of the knowledge society and as a knowledge platform make its 24,000-plus works more accessible. Moreover, given the rising significance of Art Brut and Outsider Art in the international art world, there is potential for this to be an exhibition and research center as a cultural USP not only in the State of Baden-Württemberg, but in Germany as a whole.

The IBA promoted the planning from the outset through workshops with architects and executives of comparable institutions in the international context in order to lay foundations for the competition tender. It commissioned a feasibility study to flesh out the functional and financial aspects of the project, on the basis of which the Freundeskreis der Sammlung raised ten million euros in public and private funding.