Evoluon
Encyclopedia
Convention center
A convention center is a large building that is designed to hold a convention, where individuals and groups gather to promote and share common interests. Convention centers typically offer sufficient floor area to accommodate several thousand attendees...
and former science museum
Science museum
A science museum or a science centre is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in museology have broadened the range of...
erected by the electronics and electrical company Philips
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
in Eindhoven, the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, in 1966. Since its construction, it has become a landmark and a symbol for the city.
The building is unique due to its very futuristic design, resembling a landed flying saucer
Unidentified flying object
A term originally coined by the military, an unidentified flying object is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object...
. It was designed by architect Louis Christiaan Kalff, while the exhibition was conceived by James Gardner. The building was based on an idea by Frits Philips
Frits Philips
Frederik Jacques "Frits" Philips was the fourth chairman of the board of directors of the Dutch electronics company Philips, which his uncle and father founded...
, who originally made a sketch of the building on a paper napkin. Frits Philips wanted to give the people of Eindhoven a beautiful and educational gift to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the company that bears his family name.
Its concrete dome is 77 metres (252.6 ft) in diameter and is held in place by 169 kilometres (105 mi) of rebar
Rebar
A rebar , also known as reinforcing steel, reinforcement steel, rerod, or a deformed bar, is a common steel bar, and is commonly used as a tensioning device in reinforced concrete and reinforced masonry structures holding the concrete in compression...
.
In the 1960s and 70s it attracted large visitor numbers, since its interactive exhibitions were a new and unique concept in the Netherlands at that time. But when competing science museums opened in other cities, the number of visitors to the Evoluon declined every year. After several years of losing money, the original museum closed down in 1989 and the Evoluon was converted into a conference center, opening in 1998.
The Evoluon is chiefly remembered in the UK from Bert Haanstra
Bert Haanstra
Bert Haanstra was a Dutch film and documentary director.Haanstra was born in the town of Holten and became a professional filmmaker in 1947. He won international acclaim with his short documentary Spiegel van Holland / Mirror of Holland, for which he received the Grand Prix du court métrage at the...
's wordless short film, titled simply Evoluon. Commissioned by Philips to publicise the museum, it was shown as a trade test colour film
Trade test colour films
Trade test colour films were broadcast by the television network BBC 2 in the early days of colour television in Britain during intervals when no regular programming had been scheduled. The goal of these transmissions was to provide colour broadcasting in these intervals for use by television shops...
on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
from 1968 to 1972.