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Exilmuseum Berlin (Exile Museum)

Berlin, Germany

The Anhalter Bahnhof was the gateway by which countless thousands fled Berlin with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Only a fragment of the frontage of the railway station still stands, as a monument to those who were forced to escape the German capital during this period.

A new Exile Museum is to be built behind this historic frontage on the former station site, to tell some of the stories of those who were forced to flee, while shedding light on the millions who are displaced from their homes by war or oppression throughout the world today.

Challenge

The Stiftung Exilmuseum Berlin foundation was established in 2018 as a civic initiative by Nobel laureate Herta Müller, former German President Joachim Gauck, and the art dealer and cofounder of Villa Grisebach, Bernd Schultz.

Architect Dorte Mandrup created a competition-winning vision for a building shaped like a softly curved arch, ensuring the Exile Museum visually embraces and highlights the importance of the remaining fragment of Anhalter Bahnhof.

º£½ÇÊÓƵ has been engaged to work closely with the design team on both the structural engineering behind this vision, as well as the building services engineering (MEP) that will be required to bring the new museum to life.

The Exile Museum (Exilmuseum Berlin) will house exhibition spaces, education facilities, a shop and a restaurant with an outdoor terrace. Between the historic fragment of Anhalter Bahnhof and the new building an open space will form a plaza.

Once complete, the curved facade of the 8,000m² museum will be punctured by wide arches that rise up from the base of each elevation. Lined with glazing, these will mark the entrances to the museum and also frame views inside. Yellow bricks will be used across the facade to mimic those used to build Anhalter Bahnhof.

The wide spanning arches of the facade combined with the required transparency of the building at ground floor level will stand in contrast to the predominantly brick structure. This design approach involves having only a minimum of bearing points, which would lead to foundations more commonly associated with bridge design. To support this architectural concept, the design team had to solve the challenge of a wide spanning light structure supporting a solid heavy masonry building.

Solution

A nonstandard approach was required to achieve the building’s wide spanning arches and vault like appearance at ground floor level while reducing loads on the perimeter structure.

Our experts designed a solution that separates the structural systems of the perimeter walls and the internal structure. Slender steel columns are integrated into the glass providing the same support as a brick facade.

The design team agreed on a minimum number of columns, instead incorporating composite beams which will allow wide spanning structures and reduce loads.

The curved north facade embraces the historic portal of the old train station. Disconnected from the rest of the building, the facade is nearly 100m in length and spans the full building height. Transparency and a filigree design in combination with the use of brick required a detailed understanding of both materials and structural behaviour.

Construction of the foundations also posed challenges to the team, as the heavy masonry foundations of the historic railway station structure were retained beneath the ground after the building itself was destroyed during the Second World War. There is also an adjacent S-Bahn (underground railway) tunnel that needed to be carefully considered in any foundation construction.

Our engineers devised strategies that would allow these historic foundations to be incorporated into the new structure, to prevent the costly and complex procedure of removing them to make way for new foundation systems.

As part of this rationalisation process, and to minimise the need for basement space, our experts advised on locating most of the building services control systems at the top of the building.

While the exhibits are currently planned to be multimedia-based, the client was keen that spaces could potentially be retrofitted at a future date to incorporate climate control and relative humidity adjustment, which would allow for the display of historic artefacts.

Our building services experts incorporated the necessary ducting spaces into the design to ensure this kind of retrofit could be achieved when needed.

Value

The interdisciplinary nature of the º£½ÇÊÓƵ team allowed for a highly joined-up and efficient approach to the engineering challenges of the project. We were able to draw on our significant experience of working on museum projects of varying scales around the world.

We worked carefully within the Exile Museum Foundation’s tight budget for the project and found a number of significant cost-saving mechanisms, such as the integration of the historic railway station foundations into the foundations of the new building.

Over the next few years, this landmark museum is set to take shape on the site of Berlin’s historic railway station, proving a poignant and fitting location for this important reminder of the forced exiles experienced both in the nation’s past and in many places around the world today.