MALI's New Contemporary Art Wing

HMGB Architects Heike Matcha Günter Barczik

Design: Heike Matcha, Günter Barczik
Assistance: Farzad Akhavan

Art & Curatorial Consultant: Yvonne Wahl, Berlin
Visualizations developed in collaboration with Darstellungsart, Erfurt



'The archive is that which is excluded from circulation in the present moment, but which could begin to circulate at any time.' (Jürgen Fohrmann)


1. Museum as random-access memory device

'A random-access memory device allows data items to be accessed in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory.' (from Wikipedia)

We propose 1 large space, defined through 2 devices:
a. the sky of exhibits
b. the floor of experience
Exhibits rest in a. (enclosed in protecting glass boxes), and are lowered toward b. depending on the ideas and desires of curators and visitors.
b. can change into different topographies to create seating, landscapes, plinths, stages, seperations etc



2. Multitude of spatial states - Flexibility of spatial configuration

The museum provides does not provide a constellation of fixed rooms that can allow only for a degree of change and adaptability,
but on the contrary it provides a system that can attain a huge range of different states of spatial configuration and use.
The position of and threshold between exhibition, archive, library, educational, workshop, café, auditorium etc spaces can be freely altered to create a multitude of scenarios.


3. Interactive Visitor Experience

These many states and configurations are not necessarily controlled by the people running the museum (curators, administration), but can be actively influenced, set up and planned by the visitors (and users), too.
The positioning and visibility of exhibits emerges from a combination of curators’ ideas and visitors’ desires.

4. Flexible spatial boundary

The museum’s spatial boundary is a glass case contained in a translucent fabric.
These 2 layers can - again - attain different states and relationships in a spectrum that ranges from complete closure (both climatically as well as optically) to complete opening.



Exhibition Sky

All items of the archive are housed in transparent display and holding boxes. Each box is sized according to the individual dimensions of the items it holds. All surfaces of the box are made from phase change glass that can swiftly alter its state from transparent to translucent.
All boxes are spread out in a 2-dimensional grid and hung within a holding mechanism from an equal height. Thus, a large cloud of exhibition items is formed, a sky full of work.
This Exhibiton Sky contains all of the museum’s exhibits: art works, books, media.



Floor of Experience

Below this, the floor of experience is situated, a flat empty plane of the same size as the sky matrix.
Visitors can step onto the plane of experience, wander below the archive sky and wonder at the works hung above them, freely traversing the exhibition and the archive at will.
The plane is made up of pixels in a grid mirroring the roof structure grid. Every pixel can move up and down to create topographies both rising up from and sinking into the plane of the urban fabric around the building. Also, by moving several pixels in a row upward to a maximum of 3 m, seperations like walls can be created, and certain regions of the visitors’ movement plane cut off to form workshops or classrooms.