Carl Alexander Park Baesweiler

With the competition entry "The Magic of the Black Mountains", the team Davids | Terfrüchte Partner and PASD Feldmeier Wrede won the landscape planning and urban development competition in 2002 for the conversion and subsequent use of the former Carl-Alexander coal mine site, parts of which have since been placed under nature conservation. As a flagship project of the EuRegionale 2008, the CarlAlexanderPark provides a strong impetus for sustainable regional development in the tri-national border region of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The building blocks
Located at the foot of the over 80m high spoil heap is Baesweiler's new park, the LandschaftsAder, which connects the heap with the Wurmtal in terms of cultural space and forms a new open space focal point here with opportunities for play, exercise and recreation. From the BergFoyer, the nature lover is led via the Schwebesteg and Himmelsstiege right through the fascinating wilderness of the slag heap onto the ridge path to the mountain plateau, where he is rewarded for the arduous climb with a magnificent panoramic view.
The project has been awarded the German Landscape Architecture Prize 2009.

German Landscape Architecture AwardGerman Landscape Architecture Award 2009

Jury verdict: Mining, which has now been abandoned, leaves behind landmarks visible from afar in the flat landscape around Baesweiler with its black spoil heaps. Abandoned industrial use and access prohibitions let arise over the years intra muros a special and now also legally protected plant and animal reserve.

With the courageous project, the authors succeed in building a bridge between the concerns of nature conservation on the one hand and the human desire to discover on the other hand and to develop this place into a sought-after tourist destination. The supplementary equipment is sensibly concentrated in the hard-wearing apron.

Attractively guided and unusually interwoven, the new path floats over the steep embankment through the treetops directly towards the black and treeless plateau, where it opens up an impressive panorama.

The work is particularly convincing due to the clear as well as coherent concentration of intensive use and sensitive tourist development of a protected, valuable landscape area with impressive scenic views.