The structures, apparatus and toys are there for trying, testing, playing with and practising on! Please do touch! Visitors are welcome to get actively involved - in fact are definitely encouraged to do so. "Experience" originally means: "what you get from trying and testing things"; and testing includes tasting and touching! 'But for hundreds of years now we have been used to replacing experience with knowledge, and thus live in a substitute world - a world where life, living experience itself, is displaced'. Thus wrote Hugo Kükelhaus (1900-1984), the spiritual father of the Freudenberg experiential field, in the notes for visitors to the first experiential field at the 1967 World Exhibition in Montreal.
The experiential field is set up in a way that is accessible to each and every visitor - from the age of 3 to 103:
- Hands-on sensing and feeling in a touch gallery
- Balancing and swaying about on balance plates
- A giant water prism which all can use to project a rainbow on the wall
- Wonder and astonishment at coloured shadows
- Finding your way over sticks, stones, roots and steps in complete darkness
- Eating and drinking without seeing, in the Dark Bar
- Experiencing the effect of sounds with gong, tam tam and sound bowls
- The linked double pendulum, in which one ball swinging back and forth sets the other off, and then...
- Balls that invite you to create rhythms and follow impetus
- The monochord of Pythagoras which shows how precisely the ear can measure and distinguish. We discover the musical qualities inherent in proportions of length and number relationships.
