The two subterranean exhibition rooms, with a ceiling height of a surprising eight metres, were in turn designed to accommodate the modern part of the collection. Situated within the ground-level concrete slab is the so-called Japan Room – an unusually long and narrow gallery conceptualised by Ando as a space of “tranquillity” especially for the Japanese segment of the Langen Collection. The museum offers three exhibition spaces totalling an area of 1,300 m 2 (14,000 sq ft). The building has double-skin volume and two half-buried temporary exhibition wings with a total area of 900 m 2 (9,700 sq ft) the structure mainly consists of reinforced concrete, glass and steel. The Langen Foundation's building was created on grounds which used to be a NATO rocket base. Marianne Langen, who paid weekly visits to the construction site, died in February 2004 without seeing the finished building. Since then the Langen Collection has been situated in the art and exhibition facility of the Langen Foundation. In 1979 the collectors erected a private museum in Ascona to house their collection of Japanese picture scrolls. At its height, the collection comprised around 1,180 pieces, including 300 20th-century works. The Langen residencies in Meerbusch, Germany, (built by Georg Lünenborg, 1954/55) and Ascona, Switzerland, were full of paintings and sculptures that were periodically interchanged. Her husband, Viktor, who held several patents for technical innovations in automobile production, had traveled regularly to visit customers in Japan, where the couple's collection was formed. Marianne Langen's collection of Japanese art, once mainly housed in Switzerland, consists of about 500 works dating from the 12th to the 19th century.

Haus cubus