Staab Architekten

In an 18th-century building in Ingolstadt that once housed a university medical department and is today known as the “Old Anatomy”, the German Museum of Medical History presents exhibits tracing the history of medicine from antiquity to the present. The extension will give the museum space for special exhibitions, administrative offices, a library and storage.

In future, visitors will enter the museum through the main entrance in the new wing. The reception desk and museum shop will be located in a two-storey foyer there with views of a garden of medicinal plants outside. The new special exhibitions area is located on the first floor. This is also where the circuit through the collections on view in the galleries of the old building begins, leading back down to the ground floor and the foyer. The museum café is in the “Old Anatomy” building and offers outdoor seating in the summer months in arcades with views onto the garden.

In an effort to incorporate the new volume sensitively into its heterogeneous environment, a polygonal structure was chosen whose form responds to the features of the immediate surroundings. The street façade of the new wing is angled in slightly in order not to obscure the “Old Anatomy” and to reinforce the readability of this listed monument as an independent structure. The polygonal roof planes mediate between the rooftop of the old building and those in the neighbouring old town. The public passage into the garden of medicinal plants also has a polygonal shape, widening towards the garden.