Installations

Exhibition Design

The reconstructed rooms in the German Emigration Center are just as important as the emotional family stories, personal objects, and oral history interviews – as they allow visitors to independently discover places of emigration. The design of these staged exhibition rooms requires creativity and imagination – Alke Thamsen and Ulf Klüsener from the Hamburg architecture firm Andreas Heller Architects & Designers took on this task.

Creating the Stagings

They meticulously designed the interior of the exhibition rooms, including a pub. Together with the researchers, the two interior designers developed a concept for this space in time-intensive workshops. The historical model for this was the New York ‘Old Town Bar’, which was founded in the late 19th century by the German emigrant Jacob Burckel. For a better understanding of the pub, they used photos of the New York bar, which Alke Thamsen and Ulf Klüsener utilized to exactly understand how the exhibition room should look after completion. Every little detail of the interior design was coordinated mutually to replicate the space as closely as possible to the historical model. However, it is not copied one-to-one – rather, individual significant elements are reconstructed, but never an entire room.

The Importance of Details

Oke Wilke, project manager at Studio Hamburg, and his team create the individual installations based on the design concepts of Alke Thamsen and Ulf Klüsener in the workshops of the Hanseatic city. However, the furniture should not look perfect, but rather authentic – just as if it had sprung from the Old Town Bar in New York. After the creations, the work is not done, now the finishing touches begin: Despite the painstakingly laid mosaic floor, Ulf Klüsener is now creating a crack in the tile. Oke Wilke adds to this with a cloth full of black paint and adds more signs of use to the floor. These are the details that transform a simple room into a lifelike installation – the space is brought to life.

In these tasks, other staff members also come into play, who need to be informed about the exhibition details: the housekeeping of the German Emigration Center. Mutual communication is particularly important here so that the diligent cleaning staff do not wipe away dust and leave the floors as they are. Often, this apparent dirt is intentionally preserved and is part of the installation.

Through the work of Alke Thamsen, Ulf Klüsener, and Oke Wilke, the atmosphere of the historical Old Town Bar is created in the exhibition space. The museum guests should experience a visit to an American pub, where convivial conversations take place, beer is drunk, and people sit together – just as if they were themselves emigrants in the heart of New York.