The Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collections’s new museum is built in the small, rural town of Waldenbuch near Stuttgart. The company has had its headquarters here since its founding – in a green valley, at the edge of a broad pasture, with richly forested hills on both sides. In 1985, Marli Hoppe-Ritter began to built up an art collection with works featuring the form an content of the square as their impetus and goal. The more than 400 works bring together a plethora of artistic concepts and form am extraordinary history of twentiethcentury painting. In addition to the museum, the Ritter chocolate shop and a chocolate exhibition are located in the new building. Its composition allows a separation of functions while a homogenous building volume void of base and with a square ground area rises from the landscape. Two building parts – the museum with a café/bistro on the ground floor in one part and the chocolate shop and chocolate exhibition in the other part – frame a 12-meter-high space, fully open on its shorter sites. The various functions require individual floor heights.

The appropriate height for the museum’s exhibition spaces combined with a ceiling delivering filtered daylight results in two floors in this part, while three floors are foreseen in the other part with the uppermost floor serving a future office function. Despite the differing floor heights, the entire building has a continuous , wide roof completing the building elevation with the wide space stretching out beneath the roof’s middle zone. The longer walls of this extremely generous space are tapered in height, such that the openingto the Ritter Company’s grounds ends up beeing smaller than the one oriented towards the surrounding landscape. A large view through the space thus arises, framing an image of the landscape with pastures, forest, and fruit trees.