smac – Staatliches Museum für Archäologie Chemnitz

The archaeological museum in a former department store building

The show starts every hour on the hour at smac: five huge surfaces float up from the foyer to the third exhibition floor. Together they form the outline of the Free State of Saxony. The five elements seem to dance to the music, projectors conjure up moving images on the installation.
 

Multimedia and full of surprises

Sure, there are old clay pots in the smac. But the museum is not dusty. Guests love to digitally transform themselves into Neanderthals. Can you determine the age of a piece of wood based on the growth rings? Or sort ceramic vessels archaeologist-style using the swipe function? Unmasking a forgery is also exciting: go to the monastery library and find out how Cistercian nuns in the late Middle Ages forged a document. Nobody noticed at the time. But recent research has exposed them.
 

The museum in the department store building

The smac is housed in a very special building: the former Schocken department stores'. When the department stores' opened in 1930, it looked like a UFO in the middle of the Wilhelminian-style buildings. The star architect of Neues Bauen at the time, Erich Mendelsohn, designed it for the brothers Simon and Salman Schocken. The smac dedicates three sections of the exhibition to the German-Jewish history of this unique building.