The anniversary “175 Years Fürth Town Hall” is not only a festive occasion, but also a moment to pause, look back and make the roots of urban identity visible. The light installation highlights in four coordinated parts key aspects of architecture, urban development and the relationship between the town hall and its citizens.

The light art installation “175 Years Fürth Town Hall – A Touch of Florence in Bavaria” works with two contrasting, yet complementary design levels:

• A large-scale, three-dimensional beam fan – the so-called Light Tent – spans across the street below/in front of the town hall tower (Part 1) and creates an architectural space made of light.
• In contrast, the bright, precise façade projections (Parts 2 to 4) on the front, northeast and southwest sides of the tower reinterpret the history, symbolism and structure of the building in a striking visual form.

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Part 1: The Light Tent – Protection and Care

The powerful beam fans in the city colors white and green, projected from the top of the town hall tower, span a glowing tent of light over the heads of passers-by. This light tent symbolizes the protection, resilience and care that the town hall has offered its citizens for 175 years. From a distance, the tower with its fan of light appears like a luminous pyramid, representing Fürth as a modern, independent city.

Part 2: Architecture in Motion – A Homage to Florence

In the second sequence, pure white light lines wander across the northeast and southwest façades of the town hall tower. Slowly, the light traces the shapes and structures, moving along cornices, window axes and balustrades – visually scanning the architecture. These movements – horizontal, vertical, rotating – show that this building is more than just a seat of administration. It is a symbol of a new urban self-image in the 19th century.

With the construction of the town hall between 1840 and 1850, Fürth, then a growing industrial location with an emerging bourgeoisie, showed that it saw itself on par with the great cities of Bavaria. The city deliberately chose the Italian round-arched style, considered modern, civic and cosmopolitan – and modeled its 55-meter tower directly on the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, once the heart of republican urban culture. This style symbolized not only beauty, but also dignity, responsibility and tradition. The light lines narrate exactly this: a city emancipating itself, making itself visible – and taking Europe as its model.

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Part 3: Light Points and Drops – Administration in Motion

In this sequence, glowing points emerge seemingly from nowhere at the top of the tower. They leap upwards, then fall like drops of water, bounce off, vanish – and new ones appear. Thus a continuously flowing stream of light is created, a symbolic waterfall of thoughts, applications, ideas, concerns and conversations. These drops represent the daily, mostly invisible interplay between administration and citizens – the ongoing effort of listening, processing and finding solutions that takes place behind the façade.

Part 4: The 175 – Time as a Flowing Form

The number “175” appears repeatedly between the sequences. It grows organically out of the preceding forms of light – lines, drops, patterns – and then dissolves into the next sequence. No hard cut, but a transformation in light: Fürth as a city that not only carries history, but radiates from it into the future.