The Archive of the Future presents itself. The inaugural kick-off showcases the museum’s future building site in September 2018
The official opening on 14 September 2018 of the site slated for the Archive of the Future coincided with the Lichtenfels Weaving Culture Festival. The occasion offered visitors and residents the chance to wander casually, inviting them to sit and play.
During the Weaving Culture Festival, running from 14-16 September 2018, a film installation was shown daily at 7 pm, illuminating the vacant public space. Intricate animation illustrated the process of creating the willow grove – the emblematic premise underpinning Peter Haimerl's architectural design.
Designer Gero Wortmann parsed the ways in which the algorithm calculated the shape of the trees forming part of the building’s future contour: the willows’ natural growth parameters were woven into the code; a light westerly wind influenced their figuration in the process; an imaginary, fixed sillhouette – taking the form of the previously demolished building at Marktplatz 2 – was recursively grafted onto the algorithm, limiting the trees’ skyward reach. The computer thus independently generated a multitude of different willowy clusters. From all these variants, architect Peter Haimerl chose the ideal digital canopy as the final form for the Archive of the Future.