The Ruhr Museum has no comparison. A natural history museum, archaeological museum, historical museum, architectural museum, and perhaps a local heritage museum would have to come together. Ruhr Museum is a hybrid as its director Ulrich Borsdorf likes to emphasize. The Ruhr Area is giving up established patterns and traditions. It is in the process of restructuring and now has an overwhelming domicile that addresses the quest and offers potential identities.

The site is the first message. The cube of the Ruhr Museum dominates the ensemble Zeche Zollverein designed by the architects Schupp and Kremmer and now ennobled to a World Heritage Site. The former coal washing plant is a huge shrine to the history of the Ruhr Area, presented in a circular movement from the present to the geological era and back to the present. Architecture, the fittings of the sorting system, and the transportation routes play into the presentation and placement of the 6000 objects (including 1000 loans from 250 lenders, not counting the archives of 2.3 million photographs) on 5000 square meters.

Visitors go through an orange-colored dim stairwell—its railing moves downwards like a glowing steel band—from the top level of the washing plant down to the beginning of the three-part course, to the chapter “The Present.” On the seventeen-meter level, viewers first stroll along an impressive photographic panorama of streets, highways, spoil tips, fallow land, residential areas, corner stores, churches, sport fields, universities, and technology centers. Crates of Ruhr-Area mineral water report of the dirt above and purity way down below; liturgical equipment documents closed churches; trophies represent the (sport) associations; surf boards and diving suits demonstrate which leisure activities, aside from soccer, are possible on the spoil tips and in gasometers.

Foliage blossoms in a glass partition to support the thesis of the rich flora and fauna in the Ruhr ecotope and to indicate the shift from environmental destruction to renaturation. In behind, dozens of high white showcases loom upwards. In this memory gallery for people, things, and experiences is also room for nature. Visitors can read its messages in the petrified trace of a stroke of lightning or in the annual rings of a tree. The “present” of the Ruhr Area, that’s the Italian immigrant worker’s plaster figure of a saint, the canning jar people took to the air-raid shelters to heat up baby food, and the soup bowl that can only be filled halfway on the sloping table because damage to the mountain caused the house to tilt.

The aura of things unfolds even more richly on the middle, the second level: the pantries of “Memory.” The cabinets and galleries were carved out of the former depots for coal, overburden, and water. These storerooms set theatrical counterpoints. Precious exhibits adapt well into the rough atmosphere. Wondrously the ancient torsi, sculptures, and busts stand out. Magnificent are the fossil finds, rock fragments, a billion-year-old meteorite, the stuffed animals, the skeleton of the mammoth, the shell of the sea ammonites from the Cretaceous period, which—arranged to a field of flowers—were lowered into a maw.