New center spotlights science and architecture

Phaeno — which is modelled on San Francisco's Exploratorium — is Germany's largest science center, featuring hands-on physics, chemistry and biology exhibits brought together by an American curator, Joe Ansel. Phaeno officials said they hope that the center will awaken a sleeping spirit of innovation among the roughly 180,000 people expected to visit each year. "Phaeno is especially about having a good time, being curious and deepening knowledge," said the center's director, Wolfgang Guthardt. "We want to make the natural sciences understandable in a hands-on way." In the center, visitors can undergo a crash test with their own bodies, create ice at four degrees Celsius and see how tsunamis form in a wave tank. There is also a 16 foot flame that shoots into the air every fifteen minutes. All told, some 250 exhibits are housed in a nearly 100,000 square foot complex that critics have praised as revolutionary, hypnotic and exhilarating.

The center's architect, Zaha Hadid, said she hopes visitors see the building, which hovers above the ground on enormous conical stilts and looks something like a ship in "Star Wars," "as an invention and as an experiment to take hold of and discover." Architecture critics say visitors will relish doing just that, with Nicolai Ouroussoff from the New York Times calling the building "a hypnotic work of architecture — the kind of building that utterly transforms our vision of the future." Giles Worsley, writing in London's Daily Telegraph, said: "This is a building as attention-seeking as any Renaissance rathaus, or town hall, as any over-elaborate schloss housing a self-important ruling prince in some minor German town." The highbrow German weekly Die Zeit, too, noted that connection between the design and its surroundings in Wolfsburg, the city founded as a factory town in 1938 by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and now the location of Volkswagen, Europe's largest car manufacturer. Wolfsburg "always meant assembly lines, the division of labor and living according to set directions," wrote the paper, but in the museum's architecture, "much is left unclear and unfocused; it demands playfulness and intuition."

Phaeno Science Center
www.phaeno.de

Source: The Week in Germany of December 2, 2005, German Embassy Washington, D.C.
www.germany-info.org