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Erich Kästner Museum Dresden
Das mobile interaktive Kleinmuseum

The architectural concept: communication, mobility, ergonomics and the economical usage of limited resources - major themes for the 21st century. The world´s first mobile interactive micro museum is a modern piece of architecture, which mirrors the modern and many sided personality of the internationally famous author Erich Kästner, a writer of childrens books, film author, journalist, poet, playwright; for example Münchhausen, Emil and the Detectives. It combines architecture, art, sculpture and furniture in one. It works with literature and new forms of communication and education: It functions using the excitement and curiosity awakened by a playful game of hide and seek with information, it is an architectural interpretation of the unending "rooms" of a man and his work where every visitor can and must find their own way, their own answers to their own questions. An architecture that does not emphasize its facade but its introverted unending inner world.

Conceptual Pictograms
Symbols are timeless. They gender
associative understanding. Symbols
can be characters or pictograms
opening windows to thoughts and
sequences of themas, a language of
yesterday, today and tomorrow.

A house, a time machine, a Trojan horse
In the age of new media traditional concepts are put into question: how big is a house? What is a museum? What is a house? What is big? The Erich Kästner Museum is a self-sufficient little big house. It combines traditional museological elements and modern multimedia technic. Its potential lies in its smallness, compactness and its "Baustein" building block character. A multimedia nucleus with exhibits, computer, video, audio, library and 13 mobile towers with drawers for objects not only to see but to touch and remove form a cuboid that measures 3 m x 2 m x 1,2 m when closed. An organism, opening, closing, moving, where inside becomes outside, where walls lose their meaning, everything becomes a window or a door to an unending world of rooms. Volume expands, contracts, it is capable when required to close in on itself, reducing its volume to its economically and ecologically minimal Urform. It combines physical slowness with multimedial speed. Movement, thought and interaction can be experienced in ever changing constellations. Each element is a self-sufficient piece of its own. The Kern and the 13 towers form a whole which is the 15th element. One could say the museum is a lifesize toy or puzzle for children and adults which enables them to touch, ask, move, do, learn and play. They create completely new choreographies while they move and investigate the architectural elements and their contents. The museum in its everchanging shape includes endless layers of rooms. Through the use of internet and the creation of a virtual museum, which by nature of the architectural design can be a perfect twin of the real museum, virtual visitors all over the world can enter the museum in Dresden, where visitors can communicate locally and internationally. It is itself a learning communicative instrument, which through its architecture demonstrates the many facets of its contents. The exhibited and the exhibitions vehicle are one. Situated in the rich uncle´s house Erich Kästner made memorable in his famous book "Als ich ein kleiner Junge war" this house in house sucessfully bridges modernity and tradition in the heart of Dresden.

Since it opened its doors to the public in February of this year the museum has welcomed 5000 visitors from all over the world.
The museum enjoys the advantage of its architectural concept, that of a growing house, the towers being like satellites that are added to the nucleus over time in accord with the growth of its exhibition material and the ongoing results of research on the life and work of Erich Kästner. Already there is enough material for the next stage when in October a further 3 annexes will arrive.