Pferdestallbaracke 260/9 OKH
In 2022, the Department of Architectural Theory and Design was able to acquire and dismantle a historic horse stable barrack in Hemau, Bavaria. Barracks of the type 260/9 were part of numerous concentration and extermination camps of the Nazi regime (including Auschwitz II Birkenau). The original location of this type was the nearby Hohenfels military training area, where the STALAG 383 prisoner-of-war camp was located. Numerous barracks of this type were moved and reused after the war, including this particular building, which served as an agricultural machinery shed. This horse stable barrack, which was dismantled by students from the University of Kassel in July/August 2022, will be rebuilt at the Freilandmuseum Oberpfalz in 2024/25.
Images and Plans
Technical Description
The complexity of the project for an adequate museum presentation of the barrack lies not only in conceptual and conservation issues and its practical implementation, but also in the fact that it represents a type. As just one of many possible formulations, the building initially reveals the physical traces of the object's inscribed history, which are preserved in the museum. At the same time, we are dealing with a universal type, hundreds of which have been used in various contexts since 1940. The contextualization ultimately leads to the history of war and dehumanization up to the Shoah. Barracks of the type 260/9 were not only used as horse stables, as they were designed to be. Instead, the National Socialists crammed prisoners into them. The diversity and scope of these uses will be illustrated here. To make the different contexts accessible to visitors to the museum, they can follow five narratives. These narrative strands are fed from various sources that were selected, interpreted and embedded in AR in the project studio.
The focus is initially on the physical space in and around the object. The barrack is not to be subjected to a dominant temporal position, as is usually the case in open-air museums. Rather, the result is a picture puzzle of different temporal states in one object, the meaning of which thus oscillates. The real space is overlaid with augmented reality: several alternative appearances of the object are visualized on a hand-held device. Different states of the object - i.e. different use cases of the universal type, but also different time phases - are visualized.
