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nora® rubber flooring lies at the bottom of the sea in Bremen's Übersee Museum
Dreams of the South Sea at a Beach on the North Sea The field of tension within the Bremen Übersee Museum is remarkable: South Sea worlds are shown on the German North Sea coast - the 17-meter-high hall of the museum rises up from the Northern German lowlands. In its rooms it accommodates about 1.1 million objects from such fields as natural history, ethnography and commercial science, making it a unique collection in Europe. Within the scope of a new exhibition concept, the areas of the collection, which had been separated up to now, will be rearranged in integrated thematic worlds. The new Oceania Exhibition, which opened at the end of last year, shows impressively how this concept has been successfully realized. With its walk-through map of cultures, the Übersee Museum invites visitors to travel through the island worlds of Oceania. The front one of the two inner courtyards, one of the largest museum halls in Europe, has been designed in the style of a three-dimensional map, where different tones of blue and green make visible the changing altitudes of the landscape and ocean. On 13 green islands, visitors can experience the cultural variety that developed in the region over 60,000 years. They can see coral reefs, sulphide chimney structures as well as imagined and real sea monsters. "We want to mesh together people, trade and nature", explains Wiebke Ahrndt, Director of the Übersee Museum. "Very rarely are these three areas combined." In addition, the Oceania Exhibition picks up visitors in the present and - with the help of state-of-the-art technology - allows them to experience the museum habitats. Thus, for example, there are computer terminals where visitors can actively gain access to information that is important to them. In order to meet the new technical challenges, the building, constructed towards the end of the 19th century, received a new glass-and-steel dome with an UV filter that protects the exhibits from sunlight. The heating and electric system were modernized, and a new central staircase connects the two inner courtyards, inviting visitors to go on voyages of discovery through bordering continents. The Brückner Atelier from Stuttgart was commissioned with the design work. This office for architecture and exhibition design already gained attention in Northern Germany with the "Titanic" exhibition in Hamburg and the "Cycle Bowl" at Expo in Hanover. A large part of the walk-in map of the oceanic island world is dedicated to the South Pacific Ocean, and the visitors move effortlessly through this world - they walk on water, so to speak. A rubber flooring made by Freudenberg Bausysteme KG ensures that they won't go under. "We set stringent requirements for the floor in our Oceania exhibition," states the Managing Director of the Übersee Museum, Dieter Pleyn. "For one it had to meet the aesthetic requirements, i.e. it had to fit into our color concept with the various tones of blue which show the different depths of the ocean. And, to a certain extent, it had to resemble water - meaning that it had to appear to be alive without being restless, so as not to divert attention from the exhibits." Furthermore, the exhibition hall, which boasts a height of 17 meters, calls for a flooring with outstanding footfall sound absorption properties in order to prevent the problematic acoustics from being aggravated by an additional source of noise. The museum is counted among the most visited museums in Germany, and since there are many children and students among the 200,000 visitors every year, a very tough flooring was needed. "Economic efficiency was a decisive criterion for us," underscores Pleyn. "We need a robust flooring with a long lifetime that can be cleaned quickly and easily. We have had very good experiences with nora® rubber floorings, which have been used in other parts of our museum for many years." In this field of tension between aesthetics and economic efficiency in the Bremen Übersee Museum, the norament® flooring is persuasively shown to advantage.
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