Luthers house of death
MARTIN LUTHERS HOUSE OF DEATH
Museum Eisleben, Germany
Extension
Realisation
2009 - 2013
Area 1700 sqm
Costs 5.8 Mio. Euro
Architects
VON M, Stuttgart
Team
Dennis Mueller, Antonia Blair, Christin Gegenheimer
Client
Foundation Luther Gedenkstätten Sachsen-Anhalt
Prize
Architectural prize of the Sachsen-Anhalt UNESCO Weltkulturerbe
Fotos
Zooey Braun, Dennis Mueller
The Death House museum is one of the UNESCO‘s World Heritage Sites in the town of Eisleben in Germany. It centres around the life of Luther, a key protagonist in the reform of Christianity in the sixteenth century and was extensively renovated and extended into a museum complex. It shows permanent exhibitions as well as temporary.
The brief was to restore the building back to its sixteenth-century appearance as part of a larger project to convert the site into a museum dedicated to the life of the man and the history of the reformation.
The two-storey extension is located behind the old house and is constructed from pale grey bricks that were cut using jets of water to create an uneven texture. The colour of the bricks was especially chosen for the project so that the facade chimes together with the materials of the old building.
The main entrance can be found at the rear of the site, leading visitors through to exhibition galleries and event rooms with exposed concrete walls and ceilings.
A ramped corridor slopes down to meet the slightly lower level of the old house, which has been completely restored.
The relocation of the main entrance and all other important functional rooms into the new building made it possible to largely preserve the existing basic structure of the old building.
Because of its clear cubature and structure, the new building which is connected to the existing one expresses itself in a self-conscious and contemporary speech, still it subordinates itself under the existing and its environment conditioned by the materiality of its facade as well as the differentiation of the single parts of the building in dimension and height.
Because of the mutual integration of the new and the existing building a significant and impressing round tour through the museum rooms has been developed - a tour that confronts the visitor with a diversity of aspects and themes of the permanent exhibition ‚Luthers letzter Weg‘.