Editorial: Outlook on the future contribution of museums to the history of construction engineering

Abstract

The permanent collections of many museums, including the museums of science and technology at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, can often serve as places for the study of civil and building engineering history in addition to the museums' temporary exhibitions and their various educational initiatives. They can, for example, present the physical basis for structural analysis related to different construction techniques on the one hand and, on the other, show models representing both historical and modern construction methods and examples of specific construction materials and their applications. Other galleries of the Deutsches Museum are devoted to topics such as surveying, and the production of materials in general. The visitor is conducted as a curious observer to a construction site.An interesting and frequent observation in exhibitions devoted to construction is that, due to the schematic summary of the technical facts in an organised context, the particular task of a modern engineer can be comprehended better as part of an integrated general vision, of which many of us are not always conscious anymore, because we are working mostly on specific details.What means of presenting the history of construction engineering are available? The first and most impressive one is always to show the original, if its size permits; if not, a model is a highly feasible and attractive alternative form of abstraction, reducing the original to its essential elements and distilling the original artifacts and processes to an instructive scale. Experiments may also be used to explain the basic structural facts.The main challenge for the museum curator is to reduce complex construction processes to a comprehensible level (without undue simplification) for a general public or to a compendium for engineering students, including material such as diagrams and multimedia images. Creating an exhibition and undertaking the indispensable accompanying research is a scientific task for the curator and their advisory team. The exhibition finally makes visible to the public the results of the study of construction history through objects, models and the associated graphical and textual material.The planning and building of models is an excellent scientific approach to the history of construction. First of all, the curator and the model builder have to determine the precise purpose of the presentation: whether it is educational for a specific public, reconstructive for historic preservation of a lost original, promotional for conservation of an existing construction, or for the rediscovery of historical manufacturing processes, and more besides. It makes a great difference if you want to show a process or a finished construction. In the first case, there is the choice of the best moment during the construction period in order to display the largest number of details that explain the process; this is an important scientific step. In the second case, when representing the finished construction, the decision will refer more to the desired historical ...