| Sabine Dobel |
MUNICH (dpa) – The alpine chalet has been dismantled, its beams and roofing shingles and numbered, because it’s supposed to be put back together when the modernisation is finished – in 10 years.
For almost a century, Munich’s weirdly wonderful museum of technology has been acquiring mighty machines and ingenious German craft objects, little by little.
Now, in one fell swoop, the whole lot has to be taken out of the Deutsches Museum as part of a once in a lifetime upgrade. One of Munich’s top tourist attractions – a rival to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington – is being remade for a new generation of technology geeks.
Some 445 million euros (half a billion dollars) is to be expended by the time the building is ready to celebrate its centennial in 2025.
The result, forecasts museum chief, Wolfgang Heckl, will be one of the “most modern scientific museums on earth”.
The Aunty Ju (centre), a metal junkers aircraft from the 1930s with a wingspan of almost 30 metres, is just too big to move out of her long-term first-storey berth. The JU 52 tri-prop plane is to stay in place during a costly renovation of the Deutsches Museum in Munich
The run-down exterior of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which collects technology and is a rival to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It is undergoing a half-billion-dollar upgrade. PHOTOS: DPA
Some exhibitions are closing and steam engines, submarines and entire aeroplanes are being disassembled or placed under tarp.
Specially popular pieces such as the flight simulator or the electron microscope will be moved to new sites in the museum. Others must be carried to an aircraft hangar or to a warehouse to await the end of the rebuilding.
Hundreds of tonnes of valuable machines must be carefully put in storage. The Aunty Ju, a metal Junkers aircraft from the 1930s with a wingspan of almost 30 metres, is just too big to move out of her first-storey berth. She’s to stay on the island where the museum is located between two arms of Munich’s River Isar.
“We have a really big project on our hands,” says Heckl.
For the clearing out phase and other logistics alone, 50 million euros and nine months of work have been budgeted.
The Chemistry Department is already empty. “Artificial colours” is still written on the plastered walls of the vast hall. On the ceiling in black ornate letters are the words – methyl ester, alcohol, chloroform, benzene.
And even when half of the museum is blocked off, visitors can still wander through 25,000 square metres of exhibition space and nine kilometres of aisles and paths.
“They still get considerably more to see than they can manage on one day,” says Heckl.
“Just getting the building to pass the current requirements for the fire code demands immense expense,” he says. New stairwells are needed, and even an underground flood tunnel must be added.
The retaining wall to the Isar River is not stable. Anchors are to be drilled 15 metres into the ground, and a seal wall is to be built to keep the moisture out.
Some of the ceilings do not satisfy structural engineering requirements, says the chief of construction, Dieter Lang. Some 1,300 openings will need to be bored to determine exactly how things are.
Architecturally the rooms are to become airier and more ample. In the entrance areas walls are to come down. More than 30 of the more than 50 exhibitions will be completely reconfigured, while the rest will be upgraded. About 70 million euros is going to toward that.
The Agricultural Technology Department will be in the future be called Agriculture and Nutrition, and will deal with the themes of “scarcity and surplus”, climate change and providing for an ever-growing world population, says project leader Sabine Gerber.
It will show early planting methods next to modern agronomy technology: a mowing machine from 1850 alongside an autonomous agri-robot nicknamed Bonirob that can tell weeds from crops and pull the weeds up all by itself.
A big concept for the museum is that of history leading into the future.
“If you don’t understand Newton, you won’t understand Einstein,” says Heckl. “Whoever doesn’t understand the steam engine, cannot study mechanics and electronics.”
Parallel to modernisation, a digitising programme will bring collections online a virtual gallery planned. But even in the digital age, Heckl is sure of one thing, “Places for tactile experience will be just as important as in the past.”
To be able to smell a “used space suit” is important to discover how it was when astronauts walked in a vacuum. “If everything played out in the virtual realm, we would no longer understand anything about Earth anymore.”
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