Oberhausen Gasometer

Along the Rhine-Herne Canal, a towering cylinder of riveted steel rises 117.5 metres above the industrial landscape of the Ruhr. Commissioned by the Gutehoffnungshütte steelworks in 1927 and completed two years later at a cost of 1.74 million Reichsmarks, the Oberhausen Gasometer was an engineering marvel of its age. Within its vast cylindrical shell, supported by twenty-four vertical steel girders and clad in five-millimetre-thick metal plates, lay a storage capacity of 347,000 cubic metres. A massive pressure disc weighing approximately 1,200 tonnes floated upon the gas beneath it, rising and falling along walls coated with a creosote-based sealing compound. Designed to balance the fluctuating demands of blast furnaces and coking plants, the structure became an immense mechanical lung at the heart of Germany's industrial powerhouse.

The twentieth century brought both destruction and renewal. Repeatedly struck by Allied bombs during the Second World War, the gasometer ceased operation in the closing months of the conflict. In June 1946, a fire during repair work devastated the already damaged structure, leaving little standing above its foundations. Yet the industrial giant was not abandoned. Reconstruction crews salvaged surviving components, including the original roof framework, and gradually raised the steel cylinder once more. By June 1950, it had returned to service, its rebuilt walls again enclosing the gases that sustained the region's factories. For nearly four more decades, it remained part of the Ruhr's industrial machinery, until the decline of coal-based production and the growing use of natural gas rendered it obsolete in 1988.

What followed was a transformation as remarkable as its original construction. Saved from demolition through a decision by Oberhausen's city council in 1992, the gasometer was converted into a monumental exhibition hall and opened to the public in 1994. Its immense pressure disc, once suspended upon a cushion of gas, was permanently fixed above the floor, creating two vast exhibition levels beneath a cavernous interior rising almost one hundred metres towards the roof. Where industrial gases had once gathered in darkness, artists now explored the possibilities of scale, light, and empty space. In 1999, Christo and Jeanne-Claude assembled a towering wall of 13,000 oil barrels within the cylinder. Fourteen years later, Christo returned with Big Air Package, an extraordinary inflated sculpture more than ninety metres high, filling the former gas chamber with a luminous, cathedral-like stillness.

Between 2019 and 2021, the building underwent an extensive restoration that revealed the accumulated traces of its industrial past. Conservators examined fourteen successive layers of paint, painstakingly uncovering their sequence beneath the microscope to reconstruct the history of the steel exterior. The weathered surface was stripped, treated with zinc-rich primer, and recoated in a carefully chosen mixture of grey and oxide-red pigments, recalling the colour applied after the post-war reconstruction. Micaceous iron ore was incorporated into the final coating, lending the enormous cylinder a subtle metallic shimmer when caught by the low afternoon sun. Beneath this renewed surface, the original riveted framework continues to bear the marks of nearly a century of industrial labour.

Today, the gasometer stands among the Ruhr's most remarkable cultural landmarks, its immense interior transformed into a setting for exhibitions that explore art, science, and the natural world. The 2026 exhibition Mythos Wald brings images of ancient forests, the sounds of wildlife, and monumental light installations into a space once devoted entirely to the demands of heavy industry. From the rooftop viewing platform, visitors look out across a landscape where former steelworks, canals, and railway lines have gradually become part of a different urban world. Below them, the vast steel chamber no longer holds the fuel of furnaces, but the changing visions of artists and the curiosity of those who enter. The machines have fallen silent, yet the building has found another purpose. Within walls once shaped by the relentless rhythms of industrial production, light and imagination now occupy the emptiness, and a monument built to contain the energy of an industrial age has become a place where its memory is given new life.