The museum is currently closed and is undergoing fire safety improvements. The museum director wanted new ideas for the exhibition design for the reopening in May 2025, which is why he asked the Interior Architecture degree programme for help. The students were given free rein for the design and were given the keys to the museum for five days.
The Haller Feuerwehrmuseum Museum is located on the former production site of a cotton mill, a 10-minute walk from Schwäbisch Hall town center. Over 6000 exhibits are on display on 1600m2 and the stories of devastating town fires and firestorms around Schwäbisch Hall are told.
The tour started at 10 a.m. on Monday. 27 students (including seven exchange students from the partner university in Cincinatti) took up residence in the museum among fire engines, ladders, helmets and uniforms and immediately set to work. The museum director was astonished when he returned on Friday and hardly recognised his museum. In just five days, a wide variety of interventions were created in and around the museum.
H A L L E R F E U E R W E H R M U S E U M is now written on the windows of the museum, in each window a five-meter-high letter made of bright yellow adhesive strips. The signal color yellow continues inside. Yellow question marks in different sizes pose questions about the exhibits and meet yellow exclamation marks that provide answers. This interplay of question and answer enters into a dialogues with museum visitors and provides information on the history, function and significance of the exhibits. If you want to find out more, you can scan a QR code linked to the museum's website.
Most fire departments are voluntary fire departments, which means that the members work on a voluntary basis. The exhibition of cardboard firefighters in the entrance area of the museum shows who these volunteers are and what they do. Life-size silhouettes made of blue-coated cardboard honeycomb panels present firefighters and women and their tasks.
The students have also incorporated the vacant former gatehouse at the entrance to the site into the museum concept. The small house will be the first point of contact for museum visitors and can be used as a temporary exhibition space, museum store or bar for events as required. The students painted the cantilevered ceiling in "blue light blue" for this purpose. Inside, shelving units made of square timber and honeycomb panels provide storage space for sales and hospitality, as well as exhibition space for exhibits, text and images. In addition, the forecourt in front of the museum will become an open-air exhibition for the vintage fire engines and the workshop building in which the vintage vehicles are renovated is now called the Spritzenhaus and will be made accessible to museum visitors in future.
The workshop took place from September 23 to 27, 2024 and was supervised by Prof. Diane Ziegler and Bärbel Bilger, BIA.
The following article appeared in the Haller Tagblatt on Saturday, 19.10.2024: download
Source: Haller Tagblatt
