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Phaeno Science Centre

Phaeno Science Centre

 

The Phaeno Science Centre, looking like a huge futuristic concrete-shelled beast escaped from a scene in Star Wars, is situated on a large landscaped square to immediately arouse the curiosity of visitors with its original shapes.

Propped up on ten short legs, its triangular nose points towards the Wolfsburg train station in Germany and the ICE high-speed train rails, and beyond towards the new Volkswagen Autostadt, the large production centre of the carmaker.

A sense of strangeness, abstraction, and tension, strengthened by the visual unity of the materials, emerges from its contoured shapes pierced with rectangular round-cornered windows.

Some 250 exhibition elements are set up in this 13 000 m² building dedicated to the presentation of natural sciences and technological principles. It was started by the city of Wolfsburg and joins an area of cultural buildings at the north edge of the city like a shop window for this small city of 121 000 inhabitants and 126 000 cars.

The mass effect deliberately reinforced by the continuity of the concrete shell is in opposition with the high porosity of the ground floor. The thickset cones upon which the building sits project upwards into the interior through the exhibit floor located seven metres above ground level, and its open plan is marked out with service spaces or vertical openings arranged at random.

The whole is brought together and covered by a large three-dimensional steel lattice on the exposed structure, which is laid in one block over the entire 3 000 m² internal space. At two metres high and weighing 580 tonnes, this layer consists of 4 500 identical IPE 220 steel sections joined by 3 000 welded lattice points. Its rigorous geometry is deformed around the walls and by the floor slopes to follow the fluid and dynamic shapes of the building as closely as possible.

This highly original building thus proposes a container adapted to the contents, to give the 180 000 visitors expected after the opening in November 2005 a true experience of discovery.

Text: Bertrand Lemoine