Museum of Andreas Hofer in Innsbruck by Stoll Wagner

The Tyrolean hero Andreas Hofer, living at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, gradually rose from being an innkeeper and cattle dealer to the position of a leader of Tyrolean peasants in the civil war against Napoleon’s occupying forces. He became most famous for three victorious battles on Mount Bergisel (746 m above sea level) above Innsbruck, which took place in 1809, and since the following year, August 13 has been celebrated as “Liberation Day.” The myth gradually grew until in 1896, a 94-meter-long and 10-meter-high giant panoramic painting of the battle on Bergisel was created. Only recently (March 12, 2011) was an adequate exhibition space devoted to this large painting, covering nearly 1000 square meters, located directly below the bridge by Zaha Hadid. The new monument to Andreas Hofer is connected underground with the imperial hunting museum. The new museum, costing 23 million Euros, comes from the Innsbruck studio Stoll Wagner, and the exhibition was created by Hans Günter Merz. The museum features simple geometric shapes: a reinforced concrete cylinder is embedded into the steep slope, topped with a glass rectangular entrance hall, leaving an open square in front of the historical hunting museum building. Upon entering the museum, visitors are first greeted by a panoramic view of the surrounding mountain scenery, before taking an escalator down to the painting. This allows for a direct comparison of the current panorama with that depicted in the painting from approximately the same location over a hundred years ago.

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