History
The founding of the Center for Art and Media goes back to the early 1980s. In the context of an ever expanding media landscape, and in conjunction with a transformation of the art world, representatives from local government, the University of Karlsruhe, the University of Music Karlsruhe, the Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe and other institutes, as well as organizations and representatives of the Karlsruhe art scene formed the “Projektgruppe ZKM” in 1986. In February 1988 the Projektgruppe ZKM presented the content of their work as “Konzept 88”, in which the initiative for the fusion of the arts and the new media was outlined in both theory and practice.
With the founding of a board of trustees in 1989, and the appointment of Heinrich Klotz as founding director, the realization of the ZKM became concrete. Three dates mark the ZKM’s foundation: the resolution by the local council dated May 9, 1989, the decision by the Council of Ministers of the State of Baden-Württemberg dated June 3, 1989, and the constitution of the board of trustees with effect from August 12, 1989. When initially founded, the ZKM was located in various buildings around the city. Prior to the move to its present location, the media art festival MultiMediale (MultiMediale 1-5, 1989-1997) took place at various sites.
For some considerable time, an area to the south of the Karlsruhe Central Station had been designated. To this end, an international architect’s competition for the new building was announced on March 1989, from which the visionary design by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was to result. However, the construction of the so-called Koolhaas-Cube was abandoned in 1992 for reasons of costs and space in favor of the conversion of the disused factory building.
Karlsruhe opted for the conversion of the so-called “Hallenbau A”, an industrial ruin erected between 1914 and 1918 by architect Philipp Jakob Manz as a weapons and munitions factory. The building, divided into ten atria and with a length of 312 meters had been built on the former factory site of the Industriewerke Karlsruhe-Augsburg (IWKA), an industrial wasteland since the 1970s to the south-west that separated the city center from the surrounding urban areas. The conversion, based on plans drafted by the Hamburg office of Schweger, as well as the extension of the Media Cube which takes account of the Koolhaas design, started in 1993. With the move to Hallenbau A in 1997, the ZKM disposed over a media theater, over concert and events spaces, a media center, studios and institutes for research and production as well as a media museum. In a second stage of construction, the spaces for the Museum of Contemporary Art (move in 1999) and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (move in 2001) were finalized. From 2004 to 2005 the Museum of Contemporary Art was integrated into the ZKM.
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