Stefanie Maerzke
Aerospace Museum in Darmstadt
The Aerospace Museum in Darmstadt presents international and German aerospace history and technology to the public in an architecture that celebrates the tension between the real and the virtual, terrestrial and outer space. The museum draws on the public imagination with respect to outer space to stage an informative, educational and entertaining exhibit with historical, technological and socio-cultural content.
The museum is situated centrally in Darmstadt, home to 140.000 people, city of science and host to numerous university and research institutions as well as the seat of the European Space Agency Mission Control. Placed next to the Hessische Landesmuseum as an extra-terrestrial object, the Aerospace Museum serves as a programmed, infrastructural space and links the Zeughausstrasse to the Herrngarten. Visitors to the museum can pass through the exhibition spaces and end in the café and restaurant that faces the garden to the north.
Reflecting this infrastructural function, the Aerospace Museum is organised as a continuous passage between different exhibits and thematic zones. The building is an entire transition zone whose basic fuzzy qualities render a hybrid effect of disorientation and vastness. The fuzzy quality of the architecture blurs the border and distinction between discrete objects and spaces. The interior offers multiple paths between these zones, and the visual connectivity is open and contributes to produce the effect of vastness. In this manner the visitor who passes through the building, experiences relative disorientation on the way. He or she will happen upon exhibits and stations and be part of a continuous journey of discovery.
The fuzzy quality of the architecture was derived through an extended analysis of a knitted, wool fabric. This fabric gave the inspiration for the multi-path routing system, the global form of the building and the floating organisation of the exhibition stations as nodes within a blurred space.
The concrete and glass architecture of the Aerospace Museum embodies the dual strangeness and familiarity that we have with outer space. The building is a closed object with no direct connection to its adjacent spaces and buildings. But with an enormous glazed roof it opens to the sky and renders a constant image of that extra-terrestrial realm to which its function is dedicated.