Presentations

Exhibition Design

The reconstructed rooms in the German Emigration House, along with the emotional family stories, personal objects, and oral history interviews, are vital parts of the museum – because they allow visitors to independently explore sites of emigration. Designing these staged exhibition rooms requires creativity and imagination – Alke Thamsen and Ulf Klüsener from the Hamburg architectural office Andreas Heller Architects & Designers have taken on this task.

Creation of 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 historic model for this was the New York ‘Old Town Bar,’ founded by the German emigrant Jacob Burckel at the end of the 19th century. For a better idea of the pub, photos of the New York bar were used by Alke Thamsen and Ulf Klüsener to understand exactly how the exhibition space should look after completion. Every small detail of the interior design was coordinated mutually to replicate the space as closely as possible to the historic original. However, it is not copied one-to-one – significant individual elements are recreated, but never an entire room.

The Importance of the Details

Oke Wilke, project manager at Studio Hamburg, and his team are creating the individual presentations according to the design concepts of Alke Thamsen and Ulf Klüsener in the workshops of the Hanseatic city. The furniture should not look perfect but rather authentic—just as if it had sprung from the Old Town Bar in New York. After crafting the pieces, however, the work is not yet finished; now it’s time for the fine-tuning: despite the painstakingly laid mosaic floor, Ulf Klüsener is now creating a crack in the tile. Oke Wilke takes a cloth full of black paint and adds further signs of use to the floor. These are the subtleties that transform a simple room into a detailed presentation—life is breathed into the space.

During these tasks, other employees 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 to ensure that the diligent cleaning staff do not wipe away dust and leave the floors as they are. Often, this apparent dirt is intentionally left and is part of the presentation.

Through the work of Alke Thamsen, Ulf Klüsener, and Oke Wilke, the atmosphere of the historic Old Town Bar is created in the exhibition space. Museum visitors should feel as if they are visiting an American pub where lively conversations take place, beer is enjoyed, and people sit together—just as if they themselves were emigrants right in the middle of New York.