HG Merz is an architect with offices in Stuttgart and Berlin, specialized in museum and exhibition design, preservation and restructuring of historic buildings and graphic and medial design of exhibition content. The office was founded in 1981 in Stuttgart and extended to Berlin in 1991. Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen and Militärhistorisches Museum Dresden are two of his most important projects, others are the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, the Schlesisches Museum in Görlitz, Museum of Communication in Berlin, Ruhrmuseum in Essen and the not finished extension of the Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden in Berlin.
HG Merz, born in Germany 1947, studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart. In 1975 he won the „Freunde der Universtität Stuttgart“-Award for special academic work. Merz did a fellowship in a Low-Cost-Housing-Project with Prof. Dr. Minke at the University of Kassel. 1977 he got a DAAD-scholarship for field-studies in the USA. 1981 he established his own office as architect and exhibition designer in Stuttgart and 1993 also in Berlin.
Since 1993 Merz has a professorship for Exhibition Design at the Department of Visual Communication at the University of Applied Sciences at Pforzheim.
Speaker at Session 2: The Museum as a Site of Narration
In the borderland between architecture, scenography and conception it is the task of the museum designer to make history readable on the basis of artefacts.
It should be the aim to say much with as little words possible and via a restraint presentation. The interventions should not obstruct the visitor’s imagination, but lead him in the direction of what he should imagine.
The choice and arrangement of the objects, the quality of the materials, and, to a certain degree, the associative decoration are the devices of the narration. It’s basically the narration’s task to depict a clearly defined theme.
As museums are places constructed for the purpose of conservation, they conserve what otherwise would get lost. They stage individual and collective history, thus are a theatre of memories.
The museum designer imparts knowledge in an enjoyable, stimulating way, connects didactics with experience, and translates tradion into forms.
On the one hand, he vitalizes tradition and communicates traditional values; on the other hand, he satisfies the materially and visually oversaturated affluent citizen’s desire for authentic experiences and stories.
Thereby the protagonists, the exhibits, may neither be crushed by over-staging, nor be abased to “ready-mades”.
The Mercedes-Benz Museum, the Silesian Museum in Görlitz, the Memorial of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the Museum of Communication in Berlin, and the planned Ruhrmuseum in Essen give examples for HG Merz’s dealing with objects.
The design of the exhibits’ surrounding is characterized by the respect of the artefacts and the premise to leave enough space for the observer’s imagination.
