Awarded 1st prize in a two stage International Landscape and Urban Realization Design Competition, Oct. 1996.
(activity field constructions completed Spring, 2000)
This design involves a landscape regeneration strategy for a site of a former open pit coal mining operation in Eastern Germany, as well as a re-use and regeneration strategy for existing large mining related factory buildings, making new connections to the nearby city of Borna, approx 40km south of Leipzig. For both land territories and existing buildings the design provides for initial, interim and long-term uses and activities.
This architectural space in this project is characterized by a specificity regarding the place and the materials and an indeterminacy and openness in terms of programmes. It could attract and accept unforeseeable future activities. The idea of temporality, of change over time, is the underlying principle to this approach. It forms a basis for an acceptance of unknown futures typically absent in conventional master planning. This is a departure from the concept of zoning in urban and landscape design, considering new urban and land use strategies without reference to conventional European city planning.
The scheme tests the ideas of a metamorphosis in time from carpets in the landscape (or a garden of mining), to built carpets, a tapestry of houses, trading buildings and reprogrammed industrial buildings. The following activity fields are proposed:
Initially used as sports grounds; transforming in time into a field for new trading companies;
The large field containing several large disused factory buildings wthe large field containing several large disused factory buildings
Initially with market gardens and orchards, will become a carpet of approx. 100 patio houses built between long garden walls, with the orchards remaining;
Allowing workshop houses in time to be built within the plot divisions.
will be cultivated with fields for ecological testing; boating facilities and houses by the lake will be built within these fields.