Museum Korbach

The Wolfgang-Bonhage-Museum stands in the centre of Korbach, a small town in northern Hesse. It occupies a group of four old buildings beside the Gothic Kilianskirche and a modern extension along Stechbahn. The oldest part is a 14th-century stone warehouse that was later turned into a nobleman’s town house in the 16th century. Three adjoining 18th- and 19th-century timber-framed houses were added in stages after the Second World War. In the 1990s a new wing by Kassel architect Berthold Penkhues enclosed a glass-roofed courtyard, linking old and new with smooth Muschelkalk façades. The museum is best known for its fossils from the Korbacher Spalte, a Permian fissure filled with 255-million-year-old sediments. Among the exhibits is a skeleton and life-size model of Procynosuchus, nicknamed the ‘Korbach dachshund’ because of its long body. The display also reconstructs other Permian land vertebrates in a diorama. Other galleries trace the history of Korbach and the region, the local gold, iron and copper mining, and the extraction and processing of limestone. An outside branch, the GeoFoyer Kalkturm, explains the region’s lime industry. Inside, the glass-roofed courtyard lets daylight flood the connecting corridors between the old stone house and the modern extension. The stone building’s rough walls still show the scars of its warehouse past and later remodelling. The three timber-framed houses have smaller proportions and simple tiled roofs. The new wing’s four linked volumes echo the scale of the historic group while giving the whole complex a light, airy feel.