Admirably perverse: tectonic expression and the puzzles of Galerie Goetz

The Galerie Goetz is a small art gallery built between 1989 and 1992, one of the early works of Herzog & de Meuron which helped to win them such commissions as Tate Modern and launched their spectacular international career. At first sight this box-like building standing at the far end of a villa garden in a Munich suburb seems rather dead-pan and understated: from the street [2] you register only the upper floor, a box measured out in five bays, for the ground level is perfectly obscured by the garden fence, an apparently banal element carefully remade by the architects.