The Zollverein Park - A park is being created Outdoor facilities at the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site in Essen

"There are landscapes that have been forgotten. They have been left somewhere, nobody cares about them. You can find them everywhere; out in the countryside and in the cities. They are forgotten no-man's-lands. The lives of animals and plants tend to remain hidden here. "Normal people" are rarely to be found; perhaps a few children and young people who run away from their sheltered homes. And a few, let's call them "quirky insiders", who view these forgotten landscapes like untapped treasures.

The area of the settling ponds of the former Zollverein colliery, today's "sculpture forest", is such a landscape: remote, difficult to reach, walled in and secured with fences. For the "quirky insider", it is a park, a multifaceted open space in the immediate vicinity of an extraordinary industrial monument. A park with sparse woodland, dark bushes, water features and open, wide spaces that open up the view from the tree-shaded paths.

The park was created over the course of a few years in the middle of collieries and coking plants, almost by itself. Admittedly: Excavator drivers dredged coal sludge basins, embankments were leveled and slag heaps tipped up; pipelines were laid, steel lattice masts installed, cooling towers erected and chimneys bricked up, railroad embankments poured and tracks laid. Landscape architects and their gardening crews were not involved. Despite this - or because of it? - everything is so magnificent and also so strange."



This was our view of the Zollverein Park in 1994, when the Zollverein Park didn't even exist yet, but when work began to unearth the treasure. The park was made accessible. You could now walk through it on narrow paths. Familiar elements - bridges, steps, paths - now led to some of the sculptures and opened up new landscapes. Ulrich Rückriem placed archaic granite sculptures in special situations. Indications of particularly exciting landscapes. The no man's land could be entered, its visitors turned it into a park.



Following this first intervention, the area of the Zollverein colliery and coking plant underwent rapid development. Halls were renovated, new life moved in, master plans were drawn up, ideas developed, funds made available. Zollverein became a World Heritage Site and a symbol of structural change in the Ruhr region.

The concept with which we entered the realization competition for the Zollverein Park in 2005 combines these two perspectives on the park: the careful accentuation of the existing characteristics and qualities of a forgotten landscape and the necessary provision of new, diverse and robust infrastructures for new activities at Zollverein.



Our approach to Zollverein is based on a number of principles: Emphasis on the architectural ensemble, restraint in the landscape architecture,



Reduction of elements and materials, respect for the existing, preservation of the industrial origins, appropriation of the space by the visitors, making the transformation from a hermetically sealed industrial area to a public tourist highlight visible and tangible. The Zollverein Park, which has developed on industrially shaped terrain and which does not deny its origins through careful addition and organization, gains its unique selling point through the contrasting interplay between the clear, simple forms and structures of the industrial architecture and the diversity of the spontaneous vegetation. The shape and external appearance of the park is developed through planned and continuous maintenance.



The long-term concept of development through maintenance goes hand in hand with the gradual realization of the park's building blocks. In this way, a park is created over a comparatively long period of time, transforming the forbidden zone into a place ready for appropriation. It is not a question of defining a museum-like industrial landscape; the concept composes a landscape space from the existing elements, consciously and credibly incorporating historical and current developments and signs and offering a surface and space for future developments and uses. These can be interpreted in many different ways and offer a pragmatic dysfunctionality.