Phaeno Science Center

Phaeno is a science centre, but the first thing it shows you is the building. Zaha Hadid won the design competition in 2000, working with the structural engineers Adams Kara Taylor and the German practice Mayer Bährle, and the centre opened on 24 November 2005. It is a long concrete body — about 170 metres from end to end and 16 metres high — lifted off the ground on ten hollow, flaring concrete cones up to seven metres across. Walk underneath and the space between the cones feels like a lit cave; walk inside and there is hardly a right angle: tilted walls, sloping niches, slits cut through bare concrete, an exposed steel roof overhead. The building won a RIBA European Award in 2006 and has since played a weapons company's headquarters in the thriller The International and a particle collider in the German disaster film Heroes.

Inside is a single open "experiment landscape" of roughly 9,000 square metres with more than 350 hands-on stations, some forty of them designed by artists. There is no fixed route: themes such as vision, energy, dynamics, the senses and mathematics flow into one another, and the stations are built so that you have to think about what happened rather than just press a button. Labels are in German and English. A science theatre inside one of the cones runs live demonstrations with lasers, air, water or fire, and a three-level area for small children ends in a quiet floor where they build with corks and clothes pegs.

The site itself tells the story of Wolfsburg. The city was founded in 1938 as a planned town for the workers of the Volkswagen plant, and Phaeno sits exactly on the hinge between the railway station and the footbridge over the Mittelland Canal that leads to the Autostadt and the factory. Because it stands on stilts, the crowds heading for the car world simply pass beneath it.

Getting there

Phaeno is in the centre of Wolfsburg, next to the main railway station — the museum itself describes it as about 90 steps from the platforms. Hannover Airport (HAJ) is about 75 km away. The Autostadtbrücke footbridge to the Autostadt starts right beside the building.