On 17th January 2025, the Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum – Leibniz Research Museum for Georesources (DBM), Bochum/Germany, celebrated another milestone in the construction of its new research and depot building at the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum. In the presence of around 80 invited guests, including project participants, architects and planners, as well as representatives from the fields of politics and science, a time capsule was filled and the foundation stone was laid (Figure 1). The state-of-the-art building will house the collections of the in-house Montanhistorisches Dokumentationszentrum (montan.dok) and at the same time serve as a facility for research and digitisation. Completion is scheduled for autumn 2026.
The montan.dok’s archive holdings and objects are currently stored in external storage areas and in office space at an interim location. Specifically, these include around 350,000 objects, more than 350 archival holdings and over 30 special collections on around 7 km of shelves, 85,000 books and magazines, and 150,000 photographs. The new building at the Jahrhunderthalle offers sufficient space and optimal storage conditions for all of this. In addition, a modern infrastructure for research and digitisation of the mining history collections is being created there, which will also be available to external researchers.
“The new building is an important project for Bochum as a research location and for the Ruhr region as a centre of science,” says Bochum’s Lord Mayor Thomas Eiskirch. “It stands for the structural change from a former industrial region to a progressive scientific region. And even the location fits in with this: the new building is being constructed on the former site of the Bochumer Verein für Gussstahlfabrikation.”
“The Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum is not only a cultural institution, but also a major nationally jointly financed scientific institution in its capacity as a Leibniz Research Museum for Georesources,” says Bärbel Bergerhoff-Wodopia, member of the board of executives of the RAG-Stiftung and chair of the board of trustees of the DBM. “With this new building, we are investing in the future viability of the research museum and offering a modern infrastructure for research into the history of mining and steelmaking.”
An infrastructure that is also intended to attract external scientists from Germany and abroad. The Vice President of the Leibniz Association, Prof. Matthias Beller, adds: “The state-of-the-art storage and working conditions will open up new avenues for research activities. The building offers space for researchers and guests from the international research network, making it an excellent place for international research on mining and georesources.”
At the groundbreaking ceremony, the scientific director, Prof. Sunhild Kleingärtner, and the commercial managing director of the DBM, Tim Pfenner, filled a time capsule. Inside were a current daily newspaper, a bag of euro coins, a USB stick with 3D scans of objects from the museum’s collection, and a plan drawing of the building. “We are delighted to be celebrating another milestone in the construction of our new building today. It is of central importance for our museum, because it will house the collections that form the basis for research and are also relevant for their presentation in the exhibition spaces of the main building,” said Kleingärtner.
The building is scheduled for completion in autumn 2026. The ground-breaking ceremony took place in July 2024 and marked the start of construction. Since then, 700 vibrated stone columns up to 11 m deep have been installed. Concrete bodies are now being placed on these columns, and together they form the foundation.
The funding for the new building amounts to approximately 39.9 M €. Half of the required funds come from the budget of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the other half from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
The design by the architecture firm Carpus+Partner AG from the 2021 competition will be implemented in its entirety. The plinth level with a brick façade will house large objects in the future. On top of this will be a depository cube for the professional storage of the extensive museum collection and a cube with a steel-brick-glass façade, which will house offices and work spaces for researchers as well as archive and library holdings.
The construction project takes many sustainable aspects into account. The aim is to achieve gold certification from the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB). To achieve this rating, comprehensive concepts have been developed for various fields of work. Some of the measures that are being implemented include supplying the building with energy from a solar system and an air-water heat pump, installing humidity-regulating wall surfaces inside to ensure the objects’ storage requirements are met, as well as a green roof with rainwater utilisation and the planting of native plants in the open spaces and nesting opportunities for swallows and bats in the brick façade. (DBM/Si.)
