Science Museum Heidelberg, Germany
We were approached by a branding office, which was developing a new strategy to attract highly educated researchers to the booming biotech industry in Heidelberg, Germany. Heidelberg is a small town with one of the oldest university in Germany, and generally considered a bit old-fashioned. We proposed a museum of biotechnology, that would not only host exhibition spaces but also a real research laboratory, where visitors could witness processes as well as experiment themselves. The glasshouse structure would provide space for high tech research within a bioclimatic environment for plants and animals, where experiments and their results could be seen directly. After a long discussion the American owner of the land moved the location to the newly abandoned Tempelhof airport in Berlin. The airport where during the blockade of 1948 planes were landing day and night to feed the city was going to be closed and converted. The project would provide a centre for research on all forms of mobility and surprisingly our design proved flexible enough and was selected. So we moved the whole project to the now discarded runway in front of the historical terminal building form the 1930’s. Following protests over the reuse of the defunct airport and its redevelopment as a park, the project is looking for a new location.
