Crown Publications - The Klimahaus Bremerhaven

The Klimahaus 8°Ost in Bremerhaven looks like a giant droplet that a Bremen-based architect has placed upon the port facilities. It is a glass palace with a certain similarity to the Allianz Arena in Munich. The building is 125 metres long and 82 metres wide, a 1.5 kilometre path leads through the exhibition space of 11,500 sqm, running from Bremen via Switzerland into the deserts of Africa, the Antarctic and back via Samoa, Alaska and the Hallig islands. The journey follows the eighth degree of longitude, which not only gave its name to the project and marks its location, but also indicates the thematic aspects of route, places and climate zones.

Amptown System Company (ASC), responsible for the technical implementation was honoured with the Sinus - System Integration Award 2010 in the category "information" for its sophisticated installation of audio, light, video, media and control technology as well as for their creative system integration
Apart from the sophisticated audio, light and media technology used, some sixty Christie projectors are in operation at the Klimahaus and much of what the planners had in mind could not have been implemented or would have been substantially less convincing without these Christie DS305+ projectors.
The basic idea of the planners and developers Kunstraum and Petri & Tiemann - Bremen and Hamburg specialists for innovative, knowledge-based leisure worlds and artificial rooms - was to represent the subject of climate in all its aspects in order to make visitors curious, recognise connections and develop their own initiatives about climatic and environmental protection.

It takes two hours to do an initial walk around and at least half a day for those who want to listen to the explanations and watch the many films on their way. Specially-produced films run in the virtually countless rooms, chambers, caves, huts and landscapes. There are portraits of original inhabitants and tribal chiefs, of children or people with no opportunities of education, whose existence is threatened by climatic change.
While the rooms - that are separated by heavy slatted curtains - show the respective places, the appropriate explanation in the Klimahaus is not provided by bland illustrated charts that nobody wants to read, but rather by films that are specially produced for each stage. This material accompanies the visitor through the entire Klimahaus - using some 100 screens and round about sixty projections.

The projections hit all types of shapes and surfaces. Hundreds of objects were specifically designed and built for it and overlaid with a projection foil, most of this material was provided by Gerriets. It is clear that the positioning of the projectors is a decisive factor by which the Christie projectors were able to demonstrate their full power. "With almost each of the sixty - we were facing the same problems", explains Michael Staats, the project manager assigned by Hamburg's Amptown System Company: "The projection distance had to be minimal and the projected image enormous, wherever possible." This was why planner Heiko Wandrey had already carried out field tests at an early stage and identified the Christie DS305+ as being the most suitable projector.

A decisive argument was the lens image circle diameter and the size of projection that could be achieved. The devices work with 1:1 optics and a mechanical lens shift of 100 percent. This was the only way that projections could be used to - in some cases - fill a room. There was not enough space to simply move the projector further back. It was only in ten instances that mirrors had to be installed, this being on the floor, sometimes from a corner or hardly visible from the ceiling.
The ASC team led by Michael Staats had a whole series of projectors under test, and clear visions of what the projector should be capable of. Christie provided the ideal solution in combination with their Hamburg-based specialist VisionTools -a partner almost on site. Staats was pleased: "These devices absolutely proved their worth and we were absolutely pleased with the co-operation".

ROKU HD-2000 flash card media players are used in the Klimahaus 8°Ost and each projector has its own dedicated media player. It is only in the case of complex interactive images that recourse was made to separate PCs as media players and with such images it is usually a case of Java-activated Adobe Flash material.
Just as individual as the shapes of the individual chambers, rooms, halls and caves are, equally unique are the projector mounting devices, all of which were made by ASC. "Each of them is a one-off", explains Staats.
The entire project is controlled by the Medialon Manager Pro V5, a server software package that is just as user-friendly as it is clearly reliable. It handles the background control of not only, for examplelighting, start/standby feedback from the projectors and the sound media players, but also that of control relays that for instance open and close doors in the case of some exhibits, raise and lower screens, control sound protection curtains or trigger special effects. The Medialon Manager causes rain, storm or lightning, in accordance with either a preset time plan or depending upon programmed sequences that can be selected by a combination of buttons on the displays.

In this way, Michael Staats' team has installed challenging projections that make exhibits use a mirrored diversion to display scenic images, or another where a depression of the Niger becomes a combination of exhibit and projection: a fountain to which a mule is bound as a video representation and where control is by a genuine block and tackle, which the visitor can pull to raise a bottle of water from the fountain.
The Klimahaus was one of the largest orders so far for the ASC team and at Prolight+Sound, Michael Staats and his team received a well-deserved Sinus Award 2010 for this project.
Staats explains: "During the set-up phase, we were in action on-site day and night with 20 electricians, and 15 audio-visual technicians and put up a complete infrastructure consisting of a metalworking shop plus carpentry and general workshop. This was necessary in order to meet the time schedule and to be able to react flexibly to changes in the building and the 37 installation zones. At 21 locations on the site, we set up media technology centres. Heat emitting components and power connections from our network hardware were also placed in separate technical rooms.