Tegernsee marble
Completed in 1937, the Haus der Kunst in Munich was built under the direction of architect Paul Ludwig Troost as one of the first monumental projects of the National Socialist regime. Its vast interiors were clad in Tegernsee marble, a deep red, heavily veined limestone quarried in Bavaria. The stone’s dramatic surfaces were chosen to embody permanence, purity, and ideological grandeur.
After the war, when Allied forces stripped the building of Nazi symbols and repurposed it for new uses, the marble remained—its polished walls silently retaining the traces of shifting power and meaning. Over the decades, the same material that once framed propagandistic art has come to host avant-garde and critical exhibitions, turning the marble itself into a stratified witness of history.