Urban Room – Intensive Places in Dessau

Urban Room – Intensive Places in Dessau

The project’s attempt is the articulation of Kavalierstrasse as a series of places abundant in local qualities and urban intensities. Whereas the street appears as an over-scaled thoroughfare today, Urban Rooms | Intensive Places traces existing qualities and appropriates them as urban space-defining elements. It is the result of a vision for an urban boulevard which is based on diversity along a linear layout, thereby promoting a sequence of urban rooms. This approach derives from an urban logic that deals with the challenges of a shrinking city. Dessau’s answer to its projected demographic decline is the creation of urban cores within open, green space; a concentration of urbanity within a landscape. Thereby, the urban core represents an aggregate of different physical structures (building, infrastructures) and forms of inhabitation (programs, activities), urbanity not as one singular condition but as many. In reference to this strategy, Urban Rooms | Intensive Places identifies Kavalierstrasse as an urban form which is part of a network of streets pervading the urban core. Due to its linear elongation, it is a carrier of very different qualities that the urban core is abundant in. Its prospective redevelopment is therefore the occasion to activate and accentuate these particularities and to turn them into a sequence of urban rooms. With the amplification of these already existing characters and through the introduction of cross-directions and diagonal views, Kavalierstrasse will avoid becoming a mono-functional, branded street and will be equipped with a rich mix of local identities and forms of inhabitation.

Date

2012

Language

English

Output

Urban design proposal

Author

Günter Gassner in collaboration with Manuel Singer

Keywords

Spatial practices

Spatial imaginaries

Commodification

Drawing

Heritage