The Sculpture Park Waldfrieden

The Sculpture Park Waldfrieden lies above the Wupper valley in the Christbusch woodland between the town centers of Elberfeld and Barmen. It rises steadily over an area of twelve hectares (ca. 30 acres) up to one of the many wooded hills that surround the city of Wuppertal. Old leafy trees line the long serpentine road that leads to the park. Already here individual sculptures by Tony Cragg can be seen along the path’s embankments. The café comes into view at the last sharp bend in the road, located on the ground floor of a house built in rough masonry in 1914. From here via an outdoor staircase, you enter the bungalow built in 2007 that is the entrance to the sculpture park. The visitors’ ascent runs along one of the mighty retaining walls of sandstone that bolster the garden estate of the Villa Waldfrieden, which looks out on the valley below.

Landscaping the grounds and its garden was part of the whole Waldfrieden concept that the architect Franz Krause developed shortly after the end of World War II for the entrepreneur Kurt Herberts. At the center of this project was the two-story villa that was built 1947 to 1950 on the foundations of a previous building destroyed in the war. Its design plan for the interior was dynamically attuned to the inhabitant’s movement through the house, while the exterior was allowed to merge organically with the landscape and its natural surroundings.

On the periphery of the lawn that surrounds the house and abuts on the park and woods, a six-metre high glassed-in exhibition pavilion was built in 2007 on an area nineteen times fourteen metres. This purist room of glass was conceived as a presentation site for sculptures that could not be shown outdoors. However, its transparency allows the pieces on display to relate to the environing nature and its moods of color and light.