Topologically impaired
The Frankfurt Historical Museum has a little exhibition on Frankfurt's urban history: an intersting projct in a town that has seen a major reworking of the roadstructure and buildings in the center in the last 50,60 years. The exhibition consists of a series of maps and city-views on two or three walls (refusing chronology), two models (ancient Frankfurt and the old city center after '45) and a looped video that is temporally vague and does not reference that maps and models very cleary.
Perhaps if you're a geographer and know how to scale and turn maps and views in your mind, that's all it takes to get the picture.
And this layout probably also caters to native Frankfurters who know the old names of buildings, the location of the sights and the names of all major roads and medium-sized streets from Sachsenhausen to the Miquelallee and from the Gallus to Bornheim. And let's face it: 95% of the Frankfurt population where born here (or in Offenbach).
I wasn't. And you may call me topologically impaired. I take a while to learn new places. I can't visualize verbal accounts of city-development. But I'd like to imagine what the place looked like when my grandmother lived here, 90 years ago. Which should make me target group. But I can't make sense of the of the maps. I want to know where I am in the model.
Basically, I want layered, transparent maps that peel decade by decade so I can find out when my street was built and what was there before. I want navigatable 360-degree panoramas. I want morphs. I want the CD ROM.
Though to be fair, I'd be content if the media used in the exhibition, video, model, map and view, were connected better. Tell me which part of the map I see in the view. Tell me which part of the modern city is covered by the model of the ancient town. Start the "walks" shown in the video from a map-view or an arrow pointing out a place in the model.
