Plateaus
connected!
Plateaus Connected! — Siegen (D)
In theory, our city centers have an almost infinite resource of publicly accessible space with a high level of amenity for all residents. However, a large part of this spatial resource is taken up by infrastructure for private motorized transport, i.e. cars.
The amount of space required for parked cars alone is absurdly high: one parked car occupies at least 10 m² of public space. That means that if 100 people park their cars, the local community has to give up at least 1,000 m² of usable, living, potentially green public space. This is also the case in the community of Siegen: Here, in the immediate vicinity of the historic city center, there is an area with mainly administrative and cultural facilities serving the Siegen-Wittgenstein district. This neighborhood has a backyard character, which is mainly due to the vast expanse of impervious surfaces for countless parking spaces. What is more, there are numerous insurmountable topographical level differences due to retaining walls on the site. In addition to a new administrative building, the entire area is to be upgraded in terms of quality. The aim is to create a vibrant part of the city here.
In our design approach we use the existing different topographic levels to form a terrace-like layered sequence of interconnected landscape plateaus. The result is a high-quality atmospheric carpet of landscape with lush greenery in the center of the city
Each of the separate plateaus is used differently and thus offers different amenity qualities: the “Square of Green Islands” forming a prelude in the north, the densely greened “City Garden,” the “City Living Room” with its urban furnishings, the “Lÿz Square” in front of the Lÿz Cultural Center, and the “Culture and Play Plateau” in the very south.
Below these layered landscape plateaus, the necessary parking spaces will be built in the form of inserted parking decks. The aim here is to “renaturalize” the former giant-looking parking lot and to create a piece of usable and thus vibrant public urban space in the city center. At the southern tip of the area, the new administrative building will be erected as a hybrid timber construction with an exterior characterized by a lamellar structure.
In addition to the administrative building, the new workshop and the intersections between the landscape plateaus are also wrapped in this lamellar structure and thus visually interwoven. By deliberately omitting individual slats, a playful rhythm of compression and lightness is created, which accentuates the landscape character of the site.
