2021-11-20
Construction status report from 10 November 2021
Construction of the Reinhard Ernst Museum continues at an undiminished pace. Let’s look back at the events of recent days and weeks.
Except for a few remaining jobs, the shell is now complete. The next milestone is now being targeted to make the museum hull tight. This point is reached when all the windows have been fitted and the basic roofing work completed. The last windows will arrive in the coming weeks and the large glass area facing the terrace will be installed above the main entrance in mid-December. The assembly procedure still has to be fine-tuned, as the western side along Wilhelmstrasse is difficult to access with heavy equipment.
A small outbuilding has been added to the rear of the property for the museum. After the walls were in place, a crane then added the ceilings – like putting a lid on. The outbuilding is not clad with a stone facade or smoothly plastered; instead, the exposed concrete allows a view of the board formwork’s wood grain. The electricity supply for the museum is located in the building and there is also some storage space (e.g. for tables and chairs at the bistro).
From the construction site’s large vehicle access area, which you can get to via Rheinstrasse, several containers have moved to the northern side. There are now a total of 34 construction containers on the property’s boundary with Commerzbank – and there are more to come as the teams of workers are growing in numbers. Sometimes, more than 80 people are working at and inside the museum at the same time. For their breakfast and lunch breaks but also for offices and storing materials, a whole lot of space is needed.
The substrate for the roof greenery is already in the right place and sowing will take place in the spring. We already discussed this green roof at the Reinhard Ernst Museum back in June.
The granite facade of the inner courtyard has been completely installed and the scaffolding is currently being dismantled. It is now possible to see how the museum is being gradually enveloped in white stone. We described the particularly bright material in more detail here. The outer wall above the restaurant area and the entire northern facade are largely clad in Bethel White; the scaffolding will be taken down here shortly. The facade work continues in a clockwise direction – along the east and south up to the main entrance to the museum on Wilhelmstrasse.
The current main entrance, however, is in the east – i.e. at the rear of the museum – because this is where the largest area is available for the delivery of equipment and materials. A freight elevator has now been set up at this point too. It reaches all the floors and can take weights of up to a tonne.
As we are now heading into winter, a special building heating system will be set up soon. It will ensure a room temperature in which it’s possible to keep working. This not only benefits the people who are working on the building site every day and won’t freeze – plaster and putty cannot be used if it is too cold.
The interior work is already in full swing. In a spectacular operation, the road was blocked at night in order to bring the three large staircases into the building. Before that, exact measurements had to be taken again as to whether the 13-metre-long and two-metre-wide staircase structures would really go around the corners when transported along the museum corridors. But everything worked out as expected. Each stairway has 33 steps and weighs as much as an elephant, i.e. around five tonnes. The stairs built by the Wiesbaden company Huhle could already be walked on but the glass balustrades were still missing. You are not allowed to walk on the stairs at this time for safety reasons.
Huhle was also involved in the steel construction of the special skylight, a light dome for the highest room in the museum. The metalwork for this will also be finished soon.
Sixteen drywallers are currently employed in installing substructures for the walls in the exhibition rooms. More than 40 tradesmen work on completing these building services. Many companies are working on the floors of the new museum at the same time. Coordination of all the details on site therefore becomes more detailed and more demanding, so the project managers have to subject their plans to more stringent inspection all the time. As long as the Covid-19 pandemic does not stipulate any new restrictions on gatherings, the required number of people can be employed at Wilhelmstrasse 1 – and get us a little closer to our goal of a new museum for abstract art every day.
Photos: Frank Marburger / Klaus Helbig