The Bavarian State Exhibition tells the story of the emergence of cities in High Medieval Bavaria. Within 100 years, between 1200 and 1300, the Wittelsbachs established a network of cities that still characterizes the region today. The two towns of Aichach and Friedberg, near Augsburg, are also among these founding cities.
The exhibition's presentation in two completely different locations—Friedberg's historic halls of the renovated ducal castle and Aichach's multifunctional fire station hall from the 1960s—required fundamentally different approaches. While valuable exhibits were displayed in a museum-like manner in the castle, the same theme in Aichach was presented in a multimedia and family-friendly way.
In Aichach, the city is presented as a dynamic development, constantly changing. Each of the six halls offers a mix of media and analog presentation techniques with ever-new spatial impressions; as a multimedia film experience on two levels about the history of old Bavarian cities, as an animated daily routine through the idealized city of Siena, as a virtual thematic flight with 3D recordings through Munich based on the famous wooden model from 1570, as an "architecture workshop" through the planned cities of the Renaissance up to the utopias of the "Globalopolis," finally returning to Aichach in the last hall, with a 3D city model in superimposition and a photo series around 1914. A landmark was placed in front of the fire station, representing the medieval cities' defining architectural element—the city wall with its many towers and gables—as an abstract contemporary cladding of the facade and the hose tower.
