Melanchthon House Wittenberg

The Melanchthonhaus in Wittenberg, which remains largely preserved in its original building state, was recognised in 1996 as being part of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage, thus rendering the building itself an important object in the exhibition installed there. This also affected the criteria for the exhibition revision, which meant concentrating on the essential, maintaining visual calm, reducing the exhibits and context information, improving the main artifacts and their stories, emphasising the relationship between the building and the content narrative, and stressing the historical form of the building conditioned by its status as a historical monument.

To make this reserved approach possible, the activities to redesign the exhibition in Melanchthon’s former home went hand in hand with developing a concept for the building extension by the architects Dietzsch & Weber from Halle. The part of the exhibition located there presents a large number of impressive original objects from Melanchthon’s time – not least because it was possible to guarantee the ideal conservation conditions here for manuscripts and prints from that era.