Local Attractions:

Germany have a wealth of local attractions to inspire the visitor! We have something for everyone. This section is dedicated to helping you make the most of your time here!!!

The ICIE will provide some tourist information in the "Welcome Bag" so that conference participants find their way around the city a bit easier. In addition, to the recommended websites shown below, you could make efficient use of the available search engines to find out what is suitable for you during your visit and to be familiar with the surroundings. We hope you enjoy your stay in Ulm in particular and Germany in general.

Ulm, Germany becomes an island of art:

David Galloway

ULM, Germany: In the postwar period, the collecting of contemporary art often seemed to signal a new beginning for a generation of Germans deprived of a usable past. For the businessman and industrialist, it could suggest innovative and progressive values, even while it reinforced a historic tradition of patronage. One of the finest of those ensembles is that of the industrialist Siegfried Weishaupt, which was assembled over four decades but had never before been viewed in its entirety. Now the collection has been presented to the city of Ulm, brightly packaged in a museum building financed by the collector himself to the tune of ?8.5 million, or about $12.5 million, and offering nearly 1,300 square meters, or 14,000 square feet, of exhibition space. A glassed skywalk links the building, which opened in November 2007, to the old municipal museum. With the Weishaupt Kunsthalle, a shimmering, elegantly reductionist structure, the city of Ulm has now healed one of the last architectural wounds of war. While its famous Gothic cathedral emerged virtually unscathed by Allied bombings, many historic quarters in the immediate vicinity were decimated. The gaps were often filled by the anonymous, hastily erected architecture of the 1950s, by cheerless pedestrian zones and arrow-straight speedways for the automobiles that became a symbol of Germany's economic miracle. Indeed, many historic buildings that survived the war were sacrificed to the new cult of mobility.

What resulted was an urban hodgepodge - from narrow lanes twisting through rows of half-timbered fisherman's cottages along the Danube to the yawning void surrounding the celebrated minster. Begun in 1377 and only completed in 1890, the cathedral has the highest church tower in the world, yet the elegantly filigreed structure seemed to have been abandoned here in a sea of concrete shared with a makeshift bus station. That impression changed dramatically in 1993, when the New York architect Richard Meier restructured the square with a gracefully modulated, multi-functional "Stadthaus." It contains facilities for exhibitions, musical events and conferences, as well as a restaurant and commercial spaces. (At the same time, in the nearby town of Schwendi, Meier also built an administrative and training center for Weishaupt's firm, with adjoining exhibition spaces. This was the beginning of the collector's coming-out.)

The Bauhaus heritage of the Ulm Stadthaus, as reinterpreted by an American master-builder, was not without irony. One of the great design movements in postwar Germany also had conspicuous roots in the Bauhaus tradition. The bold but short-lived Ulm School of Design was launched in 1953 by the Swiss sculptor-painter-architect Max Bill, who had studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1927 to 1929. Though the Ulm academy itself survived for less than two decades, it left an indelible impression on post-modern design throughout Europe. In this sense, Meier's building - though decried by traditionalists as resembling nothing so much as a stranded ocean liner - was less foreign to the local spirit than appeared at first glance. It also demonstrated the power of a single, iconic structure to refocus and redefine the surrounding cityscape.

That lesson was reinforced a few years later by a gleaming glass pyramid housing the municipal library. Designed by the renowned Cologne architect Gottfried Böhm (like Meier, a winner of the coveted Pritzker Prize for architecture), the building was opened to the public in 2000. Now the architectural ensemble has been extended to include a bank building by Stephan Braunfels, who conceived Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne museum, and the Weishaupt Kunsthalle designed by Wolfram Wöhr, who headed the local architectural team when Richard Meier's Stadthaus was erected. The new buildings share an "island" created by restructuring a six-lane speedway that once sliced brutally through the heart of the city. Bordered on each side by a single, narrow lane of traffic, the reclaimed site offers a vibrant new focal point for the city.

Though no direct collaboration was involved, Braunfels and Wöhr have created a stately vis-à-vis of minimalist, interlocking volumes that constitute an homage to the modernist tradition. In its elegant restraint, the museum building makes no attempt to compete with the artworks it houses. Its sole instance of architectural bravura is a slender stairway - not for the weak-kneed - that rises in a continuous swoop to link the three floors of exhibition spaces. Those, in turn, favor the classical principle of sequential, cabinet-like spaces. What becomes visible at first glance is the collector's preference for abstraction in all its mutations: from the hard-edged geometries of Josef Albers to the meditative lyricism of Mark Rothko or Gotthard Graubner, in which Weishaupt sees a deep spirituality. The fashionable names that are standard issue in other German museums - Gerhard Richter or Sigmar Polke or Neo Rauch - are conspicuously absent. Nonetheless, there is nothing didactic about Weishaupt's choices, which also make ample room for figuration. Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Robert Longo are all handsomely represented. Warhol's "Last Supper" helps to anchor the soaring, multi-storied space at the front of the building. Longo occupies a pivotal role in the ensemble - perhaps because his monumental drawings, for all their extraordinary, photorealist precision, seem to transform familiar images into semi-abstract structures. Yet it is typical of Weishaupt's generosity that he imposes no guidelines on viewers but, instead, invites them to take a stroll through the art of the last 40 years, making their own comparisons, connections and discoveries. The inaugural show of some 80 works is thus entitled "Einfach Sehen": Just look! Not surprisingly, the curatorial tendency was to pull out all the stops for this debut. The modernist credo that "Less is more" was forgotten in the euphoria of the moment. To cite only the most obvious breach: a single, relatively short wall holds a grass-green canvas by Lucio Fontana, a perforated Fontana egg-shaped canvas in shocking pink, and a square composition by Yves Klein in his glowing, trademarked blue. It is a stunning trio, but in this technicolor context, no single work can unfold its true impact. With the passage of time, such lapses will no doubt be diminished, while shifting installations will highlight particular aspects of the collection - its fabulous holdings of works on paper, for example - not visible at the moment. If the present show offers an embarrassment of riches, there is no doubt that it has dramatically enriched the cultural landscape of this medieval university town. Today Ulm has seven museums (including improbable ones for shoes and for bread) and masterworks by four contemporary architects. Those structures radiate a cosmopolitan flair that is unexpected in a city of no more than 120,000 inhabitants, and they create a new context for the surviving historic buildings. For art-watchers and architectural fans, Ulm is now well worth a detour.

(Source: The International Herald Tribune, 2008)