MUSEum+ Furnaces VP4, VP6 in the Lower Vítkovice area

MUSEum+. Industrial Museum in Ostrava, state contributory organization

MUSEum+ is not just a museum of memory. Despite the fact that its traditional museum exhibitions cover an area of around 5,000 m2 and approximately 2,630 m2 are occupied by depositories, it has a distinct educational ambition, which lies in an understandable metaphorical form of interpretation of the past, present and future. Its programme involves tracing the transformations of life and society over time.
The existing blast furnaces can be used to clearly illustrate the history of the industrial era and the production of its essential product - steel. In the exposed underground, the foundations of the dynamics of the changes in the technologies that ensured production are shown. The foundations will be uncovered in a gentle way using the methods of industrial archaeology. It will thus be possible to show interesting findings and evidence of the development that took place hectically on the site for more than a century.
The architectural concept chosen for the MUSEum+ solution allows the authentic appearance of the blast furnaces, air heaters, dust pits, auxiliary buildings and the foundry hall with casting platform to be preserved. The newly inserted staircases, lifts and platforms, together with the adapted existing vertical pathways, allow to observe and understand not only the complex spatial and technological context of the metallurgical apparatus, but also the working processes and tasks of the people who operated them.

The new entrance structures, which are substructured beneath the steel foundry platform at the base level of the parterre (+-0.00), contain all the features and introductory information that visitors from the present need to enter a process that illustrates the transformation of life over time. Scenarios and programs to understand the transformations will be thoughtfully and objectively served to them by MUSEum+. They should not be over-directed and manipulated, but they should feel right from the start that they have the opportunity to illuminate the industrial epoch and the social transformations it has caused. It will show to what extent we are heirs to its legacy and how difficult it is to come to terms with it.
We live our own present at a time when we are perhaps more than ever wondering what the future holds. We can predict much on the basis of a critically described past and a responsibly analysed present that we go through daily. What will be the future of our civilisation, of the planet and of humanity as a whole? The answers to the questions raised can be provided by thematic exhibitions, but especially by the programme located in a futuristic object that levitates in the foundry hall's attic above its technologically shaped floor. In the bowels of this object - a tube - a kind of laboratory for predicting the future, for example in the field of technology, energy generation and social patterns of life, can be operated using the most advanced digital technologies and artificial intelligence.

Somewhat simplistically and with some exaggeration, it can be summarised that the ground floor of the study focuses mainly on the lived present, the underground between the foundations contains the memory of a constantly explored past, and an imaginative future floats above the industrial landscape of the foundry platform.
in the form of an organically modelled tube. But in reality, everything is interconnected with everything else, forming together one meaningful whole designed for exploration and education.