Urban Acupuncture @ Deutsche Bauzeitung

Urban redevelopment starts selectively in the urban field with conversions and extensions, using resources sparingly and strategically.

The reprogramming of existing buildings is not just about functional reallocation.

The reutilisation of spaces is a process that goes beyond the functional aspects and also includes the re-coding and symbolic re-evaluation of space.

Publication Urban Acupuncture @ Deutsche Bauzeitung Germany, 20 February 2007

Urban acupuncture and networks of the urban landscape

Strategies for dealing with existing buildings

Urban redevelopment starts selectively in the urban field with conversions and extensions, using resources sparingly and strategically. The reprogramming of existing buildings is not just about functional reallocation. The reutilisation of spaces is a process that goes beyond the functional aspects and also includes the re-coding and symbolic re-evaluation of space.

The Museum of Architecture and Engineering in North Rhine-Westphalia (M:AI) was established in 2006 as an urban redevelopment laboratory. ‘Probably no other state has acquired as much knowledge, expertise and experience in the transformation of the built environment as North Rhine-Westphalia. […] We want to utilise this store of knowledge and this lead in expertise for the development of North Rhine-Westphalia itself, but also for the regions worldwide that still have this restructuring process ahead of them. This will be the focus of the Museum of Architecture and Engineering,’ says the responsible minister Oliver Wittke[1].

The M:AI is intended to be a mobile ‘network museum’ – without its own building. As a ‘campaign for good building’, it docks onto existing institutions and spaces and supports and develops projects. As a first step, M:AI has sought out municipal museums as partners in order to provide impetus for the architecture of museums and their urban anchoring.

One of these projects brought the M:AI to the Museum Bochum, a high-quality building from the early 1980s, created by the Danish architects Jorgen Bo & Vilhelm Wohlert as an extension to the historicist double villa Marckhoff-Rosenstein from 1900. This time it was not about a new conversion and a further construction of the ensemble, but about an ‘unfolding of a museum landscape’, which also included content-programmatic aspects beyond the spatial component, the relationship of the building with the surrounding open space.

Recoding and urban acupuncture as a minimal intervention 

Developed within this framework, the ‘11en hain bochum’ project proposes a dual strategy for the development of the museum landscape: a renaming of the museum site that serves to develop the atmosphere of the location and an acupuncture with the help of minimal architectural interventions that support this new coding.

This is based on the city of Bochum’s project to number and illuminate the subways on the elevated railway lines that surround Bochum’s city centre in the style of the old factory gates in order to create entrance situations for Bochum’s city centre by erecting KunstLichtToren (ArtLightGates). The location of the museum, directly accessible from the city centre via KunstLichtTor 11, with its green character contrasts with the densely built-up structure of the neighbouring city centre.

This is the starting point for reinterpreting the green oasis directly in front of KunstLichtTor 11 as ‘11enhain bochum’. This communication strategy enriches the location with an associative metaphor and offers not only a new urban brand for the location but also a framework for the corporate identity of the museum itself.

To support this reinterpretation of the site, an acupuncture is proposed with the help of light architectural elements that are intended to enable new approaches and perspectives on the site. In order to define the acupuncture points, the microtopologies of the museum landscape were carefully explored and the sore points, the problem areas, were sought in the exterior and interior spaces. In keeping with the ‘11en hain’ metaphor, a micro-view was developed for the small specific situations, which also opened up new perspectives on the museum landscape by adopting very unusual angles.

For the three acupuncture points that emerged, small-scale interventions were proposed using light architectural plug-in elements that connect the interior and exterior of the museum landscape: a new entrance for museum education through the window of the old building, inverting building typologies, a high seat as a vantage point to the park, as a marker for the new café, and a display case for the museum shop, as a guiding element from the entrance foyer towards the old building.

These small interventions, which can also be realised independently of each other, enable a true art of use and have a symbolic character. They thus correspond to the ‘theory of the smallest possible intervention’ formulated in 1982 by the urban sociologist Lucius Burckhardt[1]. Following the theme of transformation inherent in the metaphor ‘11en hain’, the method of process-orientated computer-assisted form transformation was used for the architectural form-finding of the individual elements.

As part of the workshop on the future of the Bochum Museum landscape, supported by M:AI, innovative, simultaneously radical and pragmatic strategies were developed for dealing with the existing buildings. The acupunctures begin at the points of connection – between the museum as an institution and its surroundings with the help of the new museum education, restaurant and shop functions and at the boundaries between inside and outside. Viewed on the scale of the urban landscape of the Ruhr region, the museum offers itself as a node in the urban network, as an acupuncture point. The museum landscape as an oasis for urban nomads is strengthened in its attraction as a pole in the urban network of the Ruhr area.

Networks

This view of the agglomeration as a network city focuses on the network character of the urban landscape, with the transport routes, waterways and green connections that overlap and interweave the urban landscapes. In the urban landscape of the Ruhr area, which is characterized by fragmentation and perforation, such an approach focusing on the networks enables an operative understanding in order to have an interweaving effect on the fragmenting urban landscape.

The network paradigm is also used in the description of contemporary social phenomena, see the standard work by urban sociologist Manuel Castells ‘The Rise of the Network Society’. [1] Current institutions also follow this network model: ‘The M:AI can be found in the 396 cities of our country, and it is manifested in a mobile system within a network of all those involved in the presentation of and the

Diskussion um Architektur und Ingenieurkunst ein Interesse haben….“[1] so der Geschäftsführer des M:AI Wolfgang Roters.

The emerging field of network science [1] focusses on networks and enables an understanding of the development and impact of complex systems in the real world, as with X-ray vision. Network science, as a further development of complexity theory, is also relevant for understanding the complex system of the urban landscape in order to understand the topological relationships that drive the development of this highly complex structure and to have a guiding influence.

As the urban landscape is experienced along paths, motorways and railway lines, roads and canals, the mobility networks are decisive for the perception of the urban landscape. In order to co-program the images and (thus also the guiding principles) of the urban landscape, it is necessary to dock onto the networks, the motorways, railway lines, roads and canals.

Network
Acupuncture

The post-industrial urban landscape of the Ruhr area is crisscrossed by a complex system of waterways. These canals, created as transport routes in the industrial age, cut through the back of the urban landscape, the old abandoned industrial harbors and disused plants. Seventeen cities and two districts in the north-eastern Ruhr region have joined forces in the regional initiative ‘Fluss Stadt Land’ (River City Land) to upgrade this dense, interconnected system of canals and rivers, which dates back to the industrial age, into a leisure landscape.

The ‘Water Mobili’ project, developed for this regional initiative, focuses on this network of waterways and proposes mobile water furniture. It envisages a series of leisure elements to stimulate the acupuncture points of this network landscape and open it up to the leisure community and tourism landscape.

Modular construction elements are transported in containers and dock at selected points in the water landscape. These mobile water furnishings can be assembled in many different ways: from camping platforms, floating bars, stalls, exhibition platforms and picnic boxes to water theatres and canal swimming pools… or other imaginative combinations. As an open modular system, ‘Water Mobili’ lends itself to creative use.

These small network elements are used for the attachment of leisure uses and to activate the post-industrial water landscape of the Ruhr area. They float in the waterway network and inject the abandoned industrial landscapes with leisure options. As mobile elements, they constantly offer new destinations for walks to explore the urban landscape. As an acupuncture of functional elements, they overlay the monocausally developed areas with new meanings and layers. They are temporary settings and thus respect the open, free, unoccupied character of these spaces.

As mobile acupunctures in the network of the urban landscape, they enable new uses and perspectives and act as amplifiers of perception. They serve the functional reprogramming and symbolic re-evaluation of existing spaces.

Notes

1 Oliver Wittke, Minister for Building and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, in “Museum für Architektur und Ingenieurkunst des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen: Mobiles Museum – Laboratorium – Kampagne”, M:AI, No. 1, Gelsenkirchen, 2006.

2 Lucius Burckhardt ‘Die Flächen müssen wieder in Besitz genommen werden’, published in ‘Die Stadt’ 29/11, 1982 and reprinted in: Lucius Burckhardt ‘Wer Plant die Planung – Architektur, Politik und Mensch’, Berlin, 2006, p.345.

3 Manuel Castells ‘The Rise of the Network Society’, Opladen, 2001; from the English: Manuel Castells ‘The Rise of the Network Society’, Massachusetts/Oxford, 1996.

4 Wolfgang Roters in conversation with Nikolaus Kuhnert and Anh-Linh Go in ‘Museum für Architektur und Ingenieurkunst des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen: Mobiles Museum – Laboratorium – Kampagne’, M:AI, No. 1, Gelsenkirchen, 2006.

5 See, for example, Albert-László BarabásiLinked: The New Science of Networks’, Cambridge/Massachusetts, 2002, or Duncan J. Watts ‘Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age’, London, 2003.

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