German
Technik Museum
How to find us:
- Street
- Am Technik Museum 1
- Zip, City
- 67346 Speyer
- Country
- Germany
- Phone
- (0 62 32) 6 70 80
- Fax
- -
- Web
- http://speyer.technik-museum.de/
Description
At the airfield in Speyer, just a few minutes' walk from the centre, the Technik Museum Speyer presents extensive collections of large-scale technical objects and special exhibits.
On an indoor exhibition area of 25,000 square metres and an outdoor site of around 100,000 square metres, exhibits documenting vehicle and aircraft construction are displayed. The grounds also include a Marinehaus, a model-building museum and an IMAX cinema with a domed screen (24 metres in diameter, projection surface approximately 1,000 m²). In the museum's Forum there is free information about the transport of larger exhibition objects to the Technik Museum Speyer and to the Technik Museum Sinsheim.
The museum is operated by the non-profit association Auto & Technik Museum, which has more than 2,000 members. Opened as a complement to the Auto & Technik Museum Sinsheim, the Technik Museum Speyer began operations in 1991. Significant additions included the submarine U 9 (1993) and the integration of a naval museum department in the same year. The visitor offering has been supplemented and expanded several times, including by a hotel on the premises.
The central Liller Halle has its own pre- and post-war history: it was built in 1913 in Lesquin near Lille, was dismantled during the First World War and transported to Speyer, where from 1918 it was used in connection with the Pfalz aircraft works. In the following decades the site underwent several changes in military use; after serving as a repair workshop and barracks it was returned to state authorities in 1986. In the early 1990s the site was acquired and gradually converted for museum purposes; the canteen and officers' buildings were repurposed, the Liller Halle and Wilhelmsbau were renovated, and additional entrance and cinema buildings were added to the north.
Among the outstanding exhibits are the Antonow An-22, the walk-in submarine U 9, the Russian prototype of the space shuttle Buran (OK-GLI) in the spaceflight hall, and a Boeing 747-200 (D-ABYM) mounted in flight attitude on a 20-metre-high steel framework. The spaceflight exhibition documents manned spaceflight from its beginnings to the International Space Station; the Buran-OK-GLI arrived by ship transport on 11 April 2008. An original Soyuz space capsule was added to the collection in 2010. Many large exhibits are walk-in.
The museum-owned Wilhelmsbau, often referred to as the "treasure chest", presents three floors of everyday culture and the history of technology from the past two centuries (including historic weapons, dolls, fashion, everyday objects, and a clock collection). In the basement is one of the largest collections of mechanical musical instruments, with over 100 still playable pieces (theatre organs, orchestrions, self-playing pianos, barrel organs, polyphones, gramophones). Many instruments can be operated by inserting a coin or a museum token.
The museum is connected to Speyer main railway station by bus lines 564 and 565.
Place on the map
Audioguides