DENSITY + OPEN SPACE / UNDER THE BRIDGE 3




STUDIO

WS 17/18

The as­pi­ra­tion to live and work in urban areas causes a den­si­fi­ca­tion of our inner cities. The pres­sure on the pub­lic open spaces is thereby in­creased: ex­ist­ing open spaces are filled up with res­i­den­tial build­ings and so elim­i­nated from the urban fab­ric. At the same time, as the num­ber of in­hab­i­tants in­creases the pres­sure on the re­main­ing open spaces raises.

In con­trast, new open spaces are being dis­cov­ered in the city, which for var­i­ous rea­sons have not been avail­able for pub­lic use and which can now be reval­u­ated - partly by so­cial pres­sure and partly by chang­ing the frame­work con­di­tions. This ap­plies in par­tic­u­lar to areas on and under in­fra­struc­ture fa­cil­i­ties.

In the dense urban fab­ric of Stuttgart, the Öster­re­ichis­cher Platz forms a strong traf­fic-dom­i­nated, un­at­trac­tive and neg­a­tively con­noted break. At the same time, with its bridge struc­tures and its ex­ten­sive use as a park­ing area, it of­fers po­ten­tial for a new urban open space. Ac­cord­ingly, since 2016 dif­fer­ent sub­cul­tural ac­tiv­i­ties take place, or­gan­ised and hosted by ‚Verein Stadtlücken’. Mean­while the pub­lic per­cep­tion of this site is chang­ing.

In this set­ting, the task was to ex­per­i­men­tally de­sign a pub­lic open space that could reval­u­ate the par­tic­u­lar spa­tial re­quire­ments of the site and con­nect the ex­ist­ing dif­fer­ent city lev­els.

At the upper street level, the Öster­re­ichis­cher Platz will be trans­formed into a pedes­trian-friendly pub­lic space: a gen­er­ous bridge spans over the cir­cle cen­ter and con­nects the dif­fer­ent street sides and lev­els. At the same time, it serves as an open space with new stay pos­si­bil­i­ties. In order to give the new area a spe­cial at­mos­phere and pro­tec­tion, a grove, a 'small for­est', is planted along­side the bridge. The 'For­est' metaphor will be, in an ab­stract form, con­tin­ued and im­ple­mented below the Pauli­nen Bridge: a play­ful ap­proach to the ver­ti­cal­ity ex­plores the spe­cial po­ten­tial of the place. Dif­fer­ent at­mos­pheres ar­tic­u­late the elon­gated space below the bridge and en­cour­age its oc­cu­pa­tion and use.

Au­thor/sKen Knust, Mo­ham­mad Yousefi Koma
PhaseFinal Sub­mis­sion
Lo­ca­tionStuttgart
Cat­e­goriesStu­dio