In the new exhibition WETTEREXTREME (‘Weather Extremes’), a lifting platform takes visitors on a poetic adventure. The ride takes travellers through floods, droughts and storms high above the clouds. A scenery combining stage design, film, movement, sound, and effects lets visitors experience weather extremes with all their senses. The platform not only moves at its own angle of inclination, but travels up and towards the exhibition through an opening in the intermediate floor.

The emotional ride is framed by two exhibition areas: While the lower level focuses on observing the weather, the upper level is all about taking action. In the extreme weather studio, for example, the exhibits address the actual phenomena, i.e. how extremes occur and why they are happening increasingly frequently due to global warming. On the upper level, however, the weather has already left its mark. What are our options? Here, the visitors meet people who have to deal with these weather conditions and try to prevent future catastrophes. Let their actions inspire you!

To realize the exhibition, we had to overcome some major construction obstacles over the past few months. For example, three huge steel staircases needed to be removed from the floors. As large equipment would not have been able to fit into the building, standard-issue machines and equipment were converted and modified by the companies so as to dismantle the steel stairs into individual parts. Cutting giant holes into the reinforced concrete across three storeys in the newly created atrium proved to be an even greater challenge. This almost 20 meter long shaft is where the planned lifting platform, the ride through the weather extremes, is to operate. In painstaking work and in close coordination with the structural engineer, countless reinforcing bars first had to be severed and then welded back together with millimetre precision for the circular recess and finally concreted.