Tips Interior Design: Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany

The Phaeno Science Center is an interactive science center in Wolfsburg, Germany, completed in 2005. Phaeno arose from progressive urban planning by the City of Wolfsburg. In 1998 City officials were developing a plot of vacant, public land immediately adjacent to Wolfsburg's railway station and just south of VW's huge, then-unfinished attraction Autostadt. An art museum was planned for the site, but Dr. Wolfgang Guthardt, then the City's Director for Culture, Sports and Education, knew that such an institution would compete with Wolfsburg's successful Kunst Museum (Art Museum) and needed other options. Guthardt visited Technorama, a science center in Switzerland and became convinced that a science center in Wolfsburg would complement both Autostadt and the Kunst Museum.

Phaeno Science Center (Photography © Werner Huthmacher)

An architectural design competition was held in January 2000 and the prominent architect Zaha Hadid won, in conjunction with structural engineers, Adams Kara Taylor. The design won a 2006 RIBA European Award as well as the 2006 Institution of Structural Engineers Award for Arts, Leisure and Entertainment Structures.

Dr. Guthardt is now Phaeno's first Executive Director. Phaeno has enjoyed high attendance and broad public acceptance since its opening.

The Concept By Zaha Hadid

Located on a very special site in the City of Wolfsburg it is set both as the endpoint of a chain of important cultural buildings (by Aalto, Scharoun and Schweger) as well as being a connecting link to the north bank of the Mittelland Kanal -Volkswagen’s Car Town. Multiple threads of pedestrian and vehicular movement are pulled through the site both on an artificial ground landscape and inside and through the building, effectively composing an interface of movement-paths.

Volumetrically, the building is structured in such a way that it maintains a large degree of transparent and porosity on the ground, since the main volume – the Exhibition – is raised thus covering an outdoor public plaza with a variety of commercial and cultural functions which reside in the structural concrete cones. An artificial crater-like land-scape is developed inside the open exhibition space allowing diagonal views to the different levels of the exhibition-scape, while volumes, which protrude, accommodate other functions of the science center. A glazed public wormhole-like extension of the existing bridge flows through the building allowing views to and from the exhibition space.

Photo Gallery of Phaeno Science Center