Along with architectonic deposits, Haus Lange also preserves numerous layers of stories and memories. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe planned the villa in the late 1920s as a tangible variation of his design for a brick country house–a vision that has survived solely in the form of a drawing. He designed Haus Lange in Krefeld as a place where time and space as well as architecture and nature can be experienced. The Lange family filled the rooms with everyday life when they moved into the house in 1930. In the end, the private residence became a public museum in 1955. Numerous artists have occupied themselves since then with this special location, creating artworks specifically for it.

Numerous publications tell about the house’s eventful history and guided tours through the villa convey diverse aspects regarding the site, challenging the visitor’s imagination. With Mixed Reality, a computerized broadening of the perception of reality, stories from the history of the house are told in a new and technically innovative manner. Augmented Reality adds virtual superimpositions and deposits to the actual space. Wearing HoloLens, visitors can ‘see’ works of art that, for example, once hung at a certain spot in the house or pieces of furniture that have not stood here for years. The projections appear in a geometrical field of vision that demonstrates the artificiality of Mixed Reality and the boundaries of technical possibilities.

Augmented Reality is nevertheless perhaps capable of breaking with traditional notions of homogeneous space and the linear progression of time. Wearers of the glasses find themselves in the real space and in the virtual domestic living situation as it existed in 1930. An ensemble of furniture appears in the hall that Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich initially planned but never realized–the visitor of Augmented Reality thus also operates in an utopia here.

When the Augmented Reality mobile game Pokémon Go lured countless players from their home computers outdoors into the public space in the summer of 2016, the connection between reality and virtuality was primarily established by means of a Smartphone. The human-machine combination is condensed with HoloLens. The ancient faith in machines makes progress in a mixed construed reality appear promising. Augmented Reality is consequently employed by the industry of many different disciplines ranging for example from medicine and neurotechnology to information engineering and biological applications. In some way or other, human mental and physical capabilities are heightened. Our current utopian thinking is fundamentally determined by such technical improvements to the human being. At present, however, it is uncertain how such a transhumanism influences society, whether it has an answer to urgent social challenges or what promises it is actually capable of fulfilling.

Sylvia Martin