Dresden (dpa/sn) – After twenty years of intensive use, the so-called southern head building of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden is being renovated. The costs are around 1.2 million euros, as the facility averaged on Monday. The building is to be optimized for event operations by spring 2023, thereby improving the attractiveness of the Hygiene Museum as a conference venue. Mobile partition walls are installed for flexible room sizes, the floors are renewed and technology and lighting are brought up to date.
The southern porch of the exhibition building created in 1930 by the architect Wilhelm Kreis (1873-1955) was last renovated in 1998/99 according to plans by the architects Coop Himmelb(l)au Vienna (Austria). It contains a hall with 200 seats as well as 9 seminar rooms and the foyer. According to the museum, 639 congresses, conferences, trade fairs and concerts took place there in 2019, and almost 500 are expected in 2022.
The German Hygiene Museum was founded in 1912 by the industrialist Karl August Lingner (1861-1916), the inventor of the Odol mouthwash. In the Weimar Republic, it contributed to the democratization of the health system with its understandable presentation of science, and then worked on “racial hygiene” propaganda under National Socialism. A center for health education in the GDR, it was realigned in 1991 as a museum of people, supported by a foundation since 1999.