January 17, 2024

The Münchner Stadtmuseum from 2024
 

1. Full Refurbishment and Conceptual Makeover
2. Moving the Holdings, Developing and Mounting the New Exhibitions (2024–2031)
3. Interim Program from 2024
4. Press Conference Quotes

The Münchner Stadtmuseum’s buildings complex is undergoing an extensive renovation and refurbishment program. The purpose of these enhancements is to make it fit for the future, improve access from the city center and strike the perfect balance between preserving its historic buildings, adding new architectural features and maintaining its functionality as a museum.

The City of Munich first started planning this full refurbishment in 2012. In 2015, it joined forces with Auer Weber Architects to implement one of the City Council’s largest ever cultural projects, second only to the refurbishment of the Gasteig. The City Council, undaunted by the pandemic, energy crisis and unrelenting budgetary constraints, pressed ahead and the project is now poised for implementation.

Full Refurbishment and Conceptual Makeover

Our museum, an amalgam of separate buildings built at various times, can no longer offer a visitor experience in tune with today's expectations. The fabric of Germany’s largest municipal museum, its infrastructure, service facilities and amenities have for a considerable time failed to live up to contemporary standards.

In 2015, Auer Weber Architects were commissioned to translate a content-driven vision for the Münchner Stadtmuseum into a refurbishment and construction plan. Ideas were initially submitted through a Professional Services Contract (VOF) procedure. Following a Europe-wide call for proposals, five prestigious architecture firms were selected to bid for the contract. The Auer Weber proposal stood out for its particularly sympathetic treatment of the museum’s existing buildings. It adds new elements that harmoniously augment the organic development of our complex of buildings, sensitively preserving their historical elements while meeting the future requirements of a modern museum.

The plan primarily sought to complement the existing St.-Jakobs-Platz entrance on the south side of the museum by creating a generous space on the north side opening up the museum to the city. This new main entrance on Rindermarkt will lead directly into the museum’s northern inner courtyard, which will be completely covered and upgraded by a glass roof to create a new museum lobby. The design of the ground floor is reminiscent of an outdoor city square. The renovation of the inner courtyard façades is designed to be in keeping with their listed status and provide the perfect backdrop to everything the museum has to offer. In addition to a ticket desk, museum shop and Espresso bar, the courtyard will now house studio and workshop spaces and a large events hall, thereby allowing us to add to the museum’s exciting program choices. A new passageway connecting the inner courtyard to Sebastiansplatz will further enhance access to and from the city center. It will be open to the public, thus rendering the new core area of the Münchner Stadtmuseum an accessible part of downtown Munich that can be experienced both by residents of the city and passers-by.

An eye-catching new cube structure will be placed in the inner courtyard, connected by gangways on the upper floors to our existing exhibition spaces. When you pass through the ground floor you cannot fail to be struck by the cube’s metallic shell. A combination of perforations and backlighting will offer a range of lighting effects, and a graphic LED system will provide a striking display for events, exhibitions, and key themes.

However, important as these meticulously designed additions and gentle alterations may be, the project primarily seeks to preserve and refurbish a set of buildings that has developed organically over the centuries. The façades and roofs will be renovated and energy-saving measures implemented in close consultation with the Office for the Preservation of Historic Monuments. We have also planned extensive structural and fire-safety improvements inside the buildings, with much of the work geared towards incorporating modern museum technologies.

Our plans also place a premium on accessibility. We have been careful to include, for example, threshold-free entrances and transitions, extra lifts, accessible washrooms, and extensive facilities for people with visual and hearing impairments. We have consulted widely with experts and stakeholder groups with the ultimate common goal of ensuring that when the Münchner Stadtmuseum reopens in 2031 it will be a meeting place truly open to everyone.
 

It will provide a central hub where people can come together to learn about, reflect on, and discuss the past, present and future of the city and its inhabitants.

The complete refurbishment will include:

-    upgrading of the museum’s buildings to meet future requirements over the next few decades

-    a new main entrance to the Münchner Stadtmuseum from Rindermarkt

-    a covered atrium in the inner courtyard

-    a cube structure built into the inner courtyard, providing a focal point at the heart of the museum

-    inclusion and accessibility measures

-    more cultural education spaces and enhanced lounge areas

-    improved routing

-    urban enhancements on St.-Jakobs-Platz
 

Moving the Holdings, Developing and Mounting the New Exhibitions (2024–2031)

The Münchner Stadtmuseum closed its doors on January 7, 2024 and is scheduled to reopen in mid-2031. Our extensive renovation and refurbishment work is designed to make the museum’s buildings complex structurally and conceptually fit for the future. During its period of closure, our entire staff will be immersed in a whole host of activities well beyond the traditional roles of mounting exhibitions and day-to-day administration. When the Münchner Stadtmuseum will reopen in 2031, we shall have new permanent exhibitions to tell the story of the city and its people as seen from the present day and with an eye to the future.

All 30,000 square meters of our buildings between St-Jakobs-Platz, Oberanger and Rosental will have to be vacated for refurbishment. Our specialists will move the artistic and cultural assets that belong mainly to the City of Munich to a temporary storage facility in Türkenstraße. They will need to pack, transport, and store every last item from our holdings – from the smallest (a flea circus) to the largest (the 900 kg Star orchestrion).

We have been working behind the scenes for some time on moving our collections. The Music, Photography, Graphic Art/Painting, Advertising Art and Urban Culture Collections have already been moved almost in their entirety, while preparations have been underway since spring 2023 to move the Applied Arts and Puppet Theater/Fairground Attraction Collections later this year.

Meanwhile, around 100 staff members will relocate to offices on the former ARRI premises. Our large conservation studios are also moving to this site. Our staff will be kept very busy dealing with the huge logistical challenge presented by this highly complex move.

Since 2023, various collections have been collaborating on an exhibition to be installed in the historic armory. It will tell the story of the city and its people as seen from the present day and with an eye to the future. The idea is to provide a sneak preview of our forthcoming permanent exhibition on this theme. Major structural alterations will provide visitor access from St.-Jakobs-Platz and ensure full accessibility.

While our museum is closed for improvement, our team will be committed to completely reimagine the museum and its galleries. From 2025 to 2028, this will bring together staff from all of our collections and cross-cutting support functions as well as Stuttgart design firm Atelier Brückner. Our new permanent exhibition space, comprising approximately 4,500 square meters in all, will be reorganized, in a design that straddles more than one collection at a time. We shall let the way in which the new exhibitions are curated and mounted be guided by questions which are critically relevant to the city’s history.

From 2028, our main focus will be on designing special exhibitions and on developing an exciting new events and cultural education program to be rolled out when the museum reopens.

Work on reinstalling the artifacts in our new enlarged exhibition home of over 7,000 square meters will begin in 2030. The collections and staff will, as far as possible, return to the museum from their temporary home in the ARRI buildings prior to the museum’s reopening in 2031. Before we go public again, we intend to put our exhibitions through thorough testing in the refreshed and transformed museum spaces.

Interim Program from 2024

The Münchner Stadtmuseum mounted a hugely successful two-month program of farewell events in the run-up to its closure on January 7, 2024. We offered free admission to the public during this period. Over 55,000 people seized the opportunity to visit the “old” museum at St.-Jakobs-Platz one last time. On the day before the museum finally closed its doors, more than 3,000 catalogs were sold at a flea market. We heard from many visitors about their enthusiasm for the program and their deep affection for the museum itself.

Regular event formats such as the KUCKUCK theater festival for beginners and beginnings or the wonder. International Puppet Theater Festival hosted by the Puppet Theater/Fairground Attraction Collection in collaboration with the German Society for the Promotion of Puppetry (Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Puppenspiels) will continue over the next few years, and the Filmmuseum and Stadtcafé remains open until June 2027. The Münchner Stadtmuseum will also join forces with other institutions on exhibitions that are already inspired by the content and concepts of our forthcoming permanent shows. We intend to develop and expand our existing digital formats through, for example, our Online Collection’s “zum Mitmachen” public engagement section, and a research project covering the Music and Provenance Collections, our management and conservation departments as well as the Central Picture Library.

In the first year of our multi-year renovation, the 2024 KUCKUCK theater festival for beginners and beginnings (March 12 to 22, 2024) will have two new homes. This year’s program of first sensory theater experiences for the very young will be held at HochX and at HP8. The program will, in addition to hosting international performances from five countries, be the first ever to feature two festival productions.
In the era of deepfakes and artificial intelligence, the 2024 edition of wonder. International Puppet Theater Festival (October 16 to 27, 2024) explores questions that have long lain at the heart of the art of puppet theater. What is real? What is authentic? And what does it mean to be human? With shows about characters ranging from Frankenstein to Pinocchio and featuring robots and AIs both as actors and theater makers, these international productions once again bear witness to the sheer diversity of puppet theater. Another focus will be on contemporary circus productions that merge circus arts and (animated) objects and materials. This “circus theater” is both poetic and “concrete” – the visible physical exertion of the performers and sensory impact of the objects combine to create an authentic “in the moment” experience. Performances will showcase puppetry at HochX and Schauburg venues and during next year’s edition of the Festival also at Schwere Reiter, Pathos Theater and Einstein Kultur.

The Filmmuseum program for the first half of 2024 will feature the ten best German movies of 2023, a retrospective marking the centenary of Marlon Brando’s birth, our "Film & Psychoanalysis" series, a series of movies about Jewish life in Germany post-1945, and a retrospective about American director Dorothy Arzner. In addition, there will be a comprehensive show devoted to Hungarian director István Szabó, who will also make a guest appearance at the movie theater. The Filmmuseum’s "International Silent Film Days" will return in July 2024. The Filmmuseum will also host several other film festivals throughout 2024, including Mittel Punkt Europa in March, DOK.fest München in May, Filmfest München in June, and Underdox in October.

The Kunsthalle München and the Münchner Stadtmuseum have joined forces to mount a major exhibition entitled "Jugendstil. Made in Munich", scheduled to open on October 25, 2024 at the Kunsthalle venue of the Hypo Cultural Foundation.

Around the turn of the 20^th century, Munich was one of the foremost centers of European art. Visionary young artists flocked to the city to revolutionize art and change the world. At a time of rapid scientific and technological innovation and social upheaval, they sought a fairer, more sustainable way of life. Male artists like Richard Riemerschmid, Peter Behrens, August Endell, Hermann Obrist, and Bruno Paul were increasingly joined by female artists like Margarethe von Brauchitsch, Elisabeth Erber, Wera von Bartels, and Sophie Burger-Hartmann in rejecting traditional paradigms and forging a new type of art that would penetrate people’s lives down to the tiniest detail. Their ideas and designs laid the foundations of modernist art and design. Our show, with exhibits from painting, graphic art, sculpture, photography, arts and crafts, design, and fashion, explores Munich in its role as the cradle of the German Art Nouveau movement and demonstrates how the human issues of those times remain highly relevant today.

The Münchner Stadtmuseum’s internationally renowned Art Nouveau collection is a centerpiece of our museum. A few years ago, a generous donation from art collectors Kenneth Barlow and Albrecht Widmann significantly expanded and enriched our holdings. The exhibition features items from almost all our collections. This collaborative project, which will take place during our multi-year refurbishment, will give us a unique opportunity to display the full range of our Art Nouveau holdings and offer a foretaste of our future permanent exhibitions.

We also seek to redevelop our cultural education program. Over the next few years, we will design and test analog and digital formats that allow visitors to participate and interact with each other and with the museum. In a series of projects, Munich residents will be asked to share their personal recollections or knowledge of specific topics, objects, or parts of the city. These will be added to our Online Collection’s new “zum Mitmachen” public engagement section, and instantly become part of a major, communal, digital landscape of memories about Munich. Some are expected to feature in our future exhibitions.

The 2024 mobile elementary school program in collaboration with the MPZ (Center for Museum Education) will kick off with a workshop entitled ''Stadtgeschichte im Gepäck. Der Zeit-Reise-Koffer" (Unpacking the City’s history. A Time-Travel Suitcase). The museum’s educational staff will take the children on a journey back to the founding of Munich. They will draw on maps, found objects and other luggage items to discover how the city became what it is today.

Visitors will be invited to witness the changes to the Münchner Stadtmuseum in and around St.-Jakobs-Platz through a series ofguided tours and intergenerational workshops, some of which will be offered in conjunction with the Münchner Volkshochschule (MVHS).

We would also like to highlight one particular digital project which will be jointly developed by the Music and Provenance Research Collections, the museum management and conservation departments and the Central Picture Library during refurbishment. Our Music Collection, with some 6,000 items, is one of the largest and most important collections of its kind in Germany and indeed Europe. Around half of its instruments come from outside Europe, some having been acquired by the City of Munich under problematic circumstances. In the context of current discourses on researching colonial and looted art, these objects will be digitized and made available to a wider public. This will facilitate further research and networking around the world and sends a clear message that the Münchner Stadtmuseum is taking proactive measures to address its problematic provenances.

From March 2025 to summer 2027, we shall mount a small exhibition in the armory to offer a preliminary glimpse into the make-up of Münchner Stadtmuseum’s future exhibitions. Its ten sections will take visitors on a themed tour that examines and challenges traditional assumptions. It will cast a spotlight on various realities of life and hot topics within the city in a way that transcends the clichéd self-perception and perception of Munich by others. It will paint a multi-layered picture of the city and its many facets. It will cover topics such as living and urban development, sustainability and environment, security and surveillance, wealth and poverty, and themes like the role of art, pop culture and the Oktoberfest. Queer and (post-)migrant perspectives highlight the diversity of Munich society. All these themes raise important questions that are sure to be relevant to our visitors.
 

Press Conference Quotes

Anton Biebl
"Munich is investing in its culture. Munich City Council’s project to rebuild the Münchner Volkstheater won acclaim throughout Germany. Now we are investing twice as much – 271 million euros – in the complete refurbishment of the Münchner Stadtmuseum. This again clearly demonstrates our commitment to culture and how powerful and necessary it is. Since the beginning of November, over 55,000 people have attended Münchner Stadtmuseum’s free program of farewell events and taken the opportunity to visit ‘their’ museum one last time before its renovation. This shows just how attached people are to the Münchner Stadtmuseum. The refurbishment program aims to keep the museum relevant to people’s lives and ensure that it shines a light on even more people, both within the city and beyond."

Dr. Jeanne-Marie Ehbauer
"The complete refurbishment and renovation of the Münchner Stadtmuseum will address its significant structural issues and shortcomings in terms of its user-friendliness and functionality as a museum. The new Münchner Stadtmuseum will better serve its people, and the building will be improved as part of our efforts to make all municipally-owned buildings climate-neutral. From an urban planning perspective, the new design with an open entrance and covered inner courtyard has the twin benefits of bringing the museum closer to the city and enhancing the continuity of spaces in downtown Munich by providing a direct link to St.-Jakobs-Platz and the Jewish Center."

Kristina Frank
"The mammoth museum refurbishment project involves coordinating multiple aspects and needs. As cultural asset owner and manager, the Municipal Services Department (Kommunalreferat) is drawing on its extensive experience of cultural buildings to coordinate the full transformation of the Münchner Stadtmuseum. I am especially pleased that we managed to rent the ARRI area, which provides an attractive, central, interim solution that has been redesigned to meet all the Münchner Stadtmuseum’s requirements: office and workspace for its staff, storage for artistic and cultural assets, and conservation studios. We must now ensure that the ambitious refurbishment plans are implemented equally successfully."

Moritz Auer
"The refurbishment design seeks to preserve the museum’s listed buildings while also meeting its future requirements. The Gsaengertrakt’s inner courtyard will be covered over, creating a multifunctional museum lobby designed as a new public space. The openness, accessibility and immediacy of this space give it a new target public and identity, integrating the museum with the surrounding urban environment. The eye-catching cube structure will provide a new focal point for the reimagined exhibitions, enabling a flexible spatial and functional reorganization of the museum."

Dr. Frauke von der Haar
"When we reopen, the people of Munich will have a new space in the heart of the city that will develop organically and allow them to reimagine their own city history in collaboration with the museum. Visiting and spending time in the museum will meet the highest modern standards of experience. The new atrium will become the beating heart of the museum, an exciting meeting place which people can fully enjoy free of charge. The immediately adjacent cultural education areas, events hall, museum shop and Espresso bar will now be instantly visible to visitors. The redevelopment also allows us to implement our plans to make the museum more inclusive and accessible."

Press conference: Wednesday January 17, 2024, at 11 a.m. at the Münchner Stadtmuseum
with Anton Biebl, Head, Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich, Dr. Jeanne-Marie Ehbauer, Head, Building Department of the City of Munich, Edwin Grodeke, Deputy Head, Municipal Services Department of the City of Munich, Moritz Auer, Architect and Managing Partner, Auer Weber Architects, Munich Office, and Dr. Frauke von der Haar, Director of the Münchner Stadtmuseum

Journalists wishing to attend our press briefing must register by January 16, 2024 at the latest by e-mail at presse.stadtmuseum(at)muenchen.de

Press and Public Relations Office

Head: Ulla Hoering
Donata Funke / Carol Pfeufer / Maria Tischner
Phone: +49-(0)89-233-722994
E-mail: presse.stadtmuseum(at)muenchen.de