As an architecture geek, this place definitely caught my eye. The Road Traffic Hall at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne is literally made of road signs, but there is even more interesting stuff inside. The building, designed by architects Gigon/Guyer, has two floors of exhibition space, where visitors will find a high-rise rack with more than 80 vehicles that can be individually presented to them by a parking robot. There are also crash tests, car restorers at work, a number of themed ‘islands’ like mobility and road traffic information, ‘glass projections’ that show animated films of parking systems and cars flying in the air, and four meter high ‘tubes’ in which visitors can lie down and see the heaven (or hell) of future transport.
And last but not least, the ‘Formula 1 Box’ lets visitors experience a car race from the viewpoint of the driver. One can press a buzzer to alter the perspective on the projected race track while the pounding of the driver’s heart fills the entire room. Anyway, this is just one small part of a HUGE museum complex devoted to European transportation with 3,000 items in over 40,000 square meters of space. Besides all the developments related to road, rail, water, air and outer space, there is also a planetarium, the ’Gotthard Tunnel’ in which visitors can travel into a mountain as well as the ‘Swissarena’ home to the largest orthophotograph of Switzerland.
