Conversion and Design
While also modernising the Museum, the architectural interventions equally preserve the original character of Freud’s private and work rooms. The historical entrance door will continue to admit the museum public to the birthplace of psychoanalysis, just as it was open for Freud’s visitors and patients at the beginning of the last century. A new reception and ticket desk area with a museum shop and café on the ground floor will offer more than 100,000 visitors every year an infrastructure in keeping with international standards.
The exhibition area on the mezzanine is to be extended to 400 m2 and further enlarged by around 150 m2 with additional spaces on the upper ground floor. Access to the Museum and library will be barrier-free with a lift.
Hermann Czech, Walter Angonese and ARTEC/Bettina Götz, Richard Manahl
Winners of the international architectural competition SIGMUND FREUD MUSEUM 2020 on their design:
“The information content of the Sigmund Freud Museum comprises two aspects:
Information about the subject: scientific, historical and biographical information about psychoanalysis and its origins, its creator Sigmund Freud and his family, particularly Anna Freud. This aspect is not tied to the ‘Freud house’ or certain rooms.
Local and spatial presence: the physical experience of the most important authentic locality where this scientific work and the personal lives of the protagonists took place. In this respect, the house is a museum of itself.
In principle, the aspect of general information and the aspect of the locality itself should not be mingled with regard to presentation. Translated into exhibition terms, this means that information not pertaining to a particular room should generally be removed from the walls. The only information left on the walls will be facts concerning the rooms themselves and their former use, furnishings and their surfaces (and findings regarding conservation and restoration).
On the one hand, the pathway through the Museum therefore allows visitors to experience the rooms and their layout, their former use and history, providing information about their one-time appearance, while on the other presenting graduated general information in the form of texts and images.
Visitors should to a large extent be left to take their own route; however, they should be able to form a mental map as early as possible that encourages finding their own way back and between different areas.”
(Excerpt from the concept of the competition entry by Hermann Czech, Walter Angonese and ARTEC, Bettina Götz and Richard Manahl, 2017)
