Terry Pawson Architects’ competition proposal to extend the Museum focused on a desire to see the existing Museum become connected to the water and the historic boats that form an important part of the Museums’ collection.

The Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, (German National Maritime Museum), was founded in the German port of Bremerhaven in 1971 as a replacement for the Museum of Marine Science in Berlin, which had been destroyed during World War II. The Museum was first opened in 1975, in a building designed by Hans Scharoun. Built from light coloured brick and with his characteristically fragmented roofline, the Scharoun building was extended in 2000 by Dietrich Bangert.

The two existing linked buildings sit within the heart of the old dock area; pressed between, yet somehow remote from an historic stone dock basin and the grass banked sea defences that line the mouth of the River Weser. This lack of engagement between the existing buildings and the historic dock is at odds with the obvious practical connection and seems to undermine its role as a centre for Maritime research and conservation.

The scheme

Organised as a series of three new buildings, the proposed extension is linked by a new timber boardwalk running along the edge of the historic dock. A new entrance pavilion sits between the old and the new, and is entered by wide ramps that descend like slipways into the building from the northern and southern approaches. This new entrance level connects all elements of the Museum and leads directly to the waters edge in the dock basin with its floating pontoon for the historic boats.

The other key public functions of the Museum are accessed directly from the entrance hall; the café and the temporary exhibition hall both sit alongside the dock, and the workshops are on the corner of the basin.

The boardwalk maintains a route through the site, linking the southern parts of the City with the new commercial centres to the north. In addition, the architectonic references within the new architecture to the form, scale and materiality of a boatyard are both conscious and overt – thus simultaneously identifying the extension as being different to the existing listed buildings, whilst also making a new physical and conceptual link between the existing structures and the maritime tradition inherent within the site.