View of a brick restaurant

Marktplatz Rheinland

Market-place Rhineland

In the Open Air Museum the „Market-place Rheinland" constitutes a further milestone in the arc of cultural history, which will then stretch from the 15th century to the most recent past. Thereby the new Group of Buildings will be dedicated to the second half of the 20th century and will thus be chronologically connected to the permanent exhibition „We Rhinelanders".
This new Group of Buildings is still under construction.
The Market-place Rhineland is dedicated to the time from 1945 until the early 21st century. It shows the urbanization of the rural areas, associated with the disappearance of traditional images of country life.
Around a village, or market-place, various buildings from different historical areas of daily life will stand, from the post-war and economic miracle times: restaurant, hairdresser’s salon, corner shop (Tante-Emma-Laden), pharmacist, optician, baker’s and butcher’s shops, cinema, church and others. In the course of decades numerous new types of buildings are developed, which are marked by a nationwide similarity of the construction industry. Prefabricated houses and flat-roofed bungalows characterize the new housing estates bordering on the villages.
The serious changes of the 20th century are to be collected, documented and presented to visitors in the form of original buildings and their original furnishings. Buildings of various centuries from Rhenish landscapes will be translocated to the Open Air Museum and placed there following the example of village structures which historically grew together, to show their relationship to each other. Even though such a depiction in an open air museum cannot be identical to historical reality - which cannot be depicted – these many original objects, together with the buildings at the Market-place Rhineland, illustrate life in the second half of the 20th century graphically, making it understandable, or even making it „come alive“.

The sponsors of LVR-open air museum Kommern: