Hans Dieter Schaal: Ulm Minster meets Lake Constance: A different view 1973 to 2023

Hans Dieter Schaal, born and raised in Ulm in 1943, is internationally recognised as an architect, exhibition and landscape designer, stage designer, artist and author. Since the 1980s, he has lived near Biberach, from where he has developed and managed his countless projects. The Museum Ulm is honouring his 80th birthday in 2023 by paying tribute to Hans Dieter Schaal’s extensive oeuvre of drawings.

Before he turned his attention mainly to stage design, exhibition and memorial site design in the early 1980s, Hans Dieter Schaal worked on utopian projects, which he captured in brilliant drawings and gouaches on paper. The famous Ulm Minster (Ulmer Münster) served him as the focal point of a fantastic, phantasmagorical visual language that led him to turn the Gothic church building into a bird’s nest, a bellows or even to dare to repurpose the cathedral tower, the pride and joy of the former imperial city, as a residential tower. In a similar way, he took on the characteristic silhouette of Lake Constance, which suddenly appears as a bathtub, at other times sits like a figure on a bench or whose shoreline imitates the movement of a string of lights.