Phaeno Science Center

Phaeno Science Center, usually styled phaeno, is an interactive science museum in Wolfsburg, Germany, located directly beside Wolfsburg Central Station and opposite the Volkswagen Autostadt complex. The building was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects after Hadid won an international architectural competition in 2000, and it opened in November 2005 after approximately four years of construction. The main exhibition volume is raised about seven metres above the ground on massive hollow concrete cones, leaving a covered public space beneath the building. Its exposed concrete, irregular windows, sloping surfaces and lack of conventional right angles create an appearance often compared to a spacecraft or artificial landscape. Inside, the architecture continues as a series of ramps, terraces, craters and open levels surrounding more than 300 interactive scientific exhibits. The complex geometry required extensive use of self-compacting concrete and specially developed construction methods, making the building one of Hadid’s most distinctive early large-scale projects.

Phaeno Science Center has appeared in The International (2009), Helden – Wenn dein Land dich braucht (2013) and the television series Arcadia (2023). Its futuristic concrete architecture has represented an Italian weapons manufacturer, a particle-physics research facility and the headquarters of a dystopian security organisation. In both The International and Helden, digital effects were also used to relocate the unmistakable Wolfsburg building into completely different landscapes.

In The International (2009), Phaeno Science Center represents the headquarters of Calvini Defense, the Italian weapons company controlled by the Calvini family. Interpol agent Louis Salinger and New York assistant district attorney Eleanor Whitman investigate connections between Calvini Defense and the International Bank of Business and Credit as they uncover the bank’s involvement in international arms deals. The building is presented as being beside a lake in northern Italy rather than in central Wolfsburg. For distant views, the Phaeno was digitally composited into the mountainous landscape around Campione del Garda, while additional rock formations were added behind the building to disguise its real urban surroundings. The result places Zaha Hadid’s futuristic structure above an Italian lakeside settlement as the heavily isolated headquarters of the arms manufacturer.

In Helden – Wenn dein Land dich braucht (2013), Phaeno Science Center represents part of a fictionalised particle-physics research complex in Geneva based on CERN. Scientists attempting to recreate conditions from the Big Bang with a huge particle accelerator accidentally create a black hole, causing gravitational disturbances, communications failures and widespread destruction across Europe. The Phaeno is used as the command and research centre associated with the accelerator, with Christiane Paul and Hannes Jaenicke among the actors who filmed scenes at the building in September 2012. Scientist Sophie Ritter eventually travels towards the facility with Marc Weber in an attempt to shut down the accelerator before the disaster becomes irreversible. Digital effects relocate the Wolfsburg building to the Geneva area and later subject the research complex to the escalating destruction caused by the experiment.

In Arcadia (2023), Phaeno Science Center represents the headquarters of the Shield, the police and security organisation responsible for enforcing the authoritarian social system of the fictional state of Arcadia. The series takes place in a near future where scarce resources are distributed according to a citizen-score system that determines each person’s privileges and opportunities. The Phaeno appears repeatedly as the exterior of the Shield’s police authority, including scenes involving members of the Hendriks family and regulator Marco Simons. Filming took place around the building for three days in January 2022, using the entrance, exterior and areas beneath the elevated structure; local reporting also identifies the Conehall as appearing in the series. The principal interior rooms of the police headquarters, however, were constructed and filmed in a studio in Belgium, making the Phaeno primarily the real-world architectural shell of the organisation’s headquarters.

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