Circular Configurator
Second semester students of the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, Faculty of Architecture, designed and built an urban installation for the Rhine-Main Summer of Architecture.
Bridges connect places: in 2014 the sudden closure of the Schiersteiner Bridge between Mainz and Wiesbaden, an infrastructural node in the region, made painfully clear how infrastructure decisively determines whether or not a region or city is connected to its surroundings. Equally important is the Theodor Heuss Bridge, also connecting Mainz and Wiesbaden. This bridge goes back to roman times and has been intensively used throughout all historical turmoil up until the present. Over the decades the continuous growth of traffic infrastructure has turned the area of bridgehead into a collection of isolated urban fragments - hard for pedestrians to reach and of poor spatial quality. One of these fragments is located just west of the Rhine Street at the foot of the historic Eisenturm, a tower that is clearly visible from the opposite bank of the Rhine and that defines, with the cathedral and the city hall by Arne Jacobson, the skyline of Mainz. The students chose this site for their contribution to the Summer of Architecture. They wanted to return this "wasteland" back into everyday urban consciousness and reactivate the area. A visible, articulated space around and through the tower was to provide a place for exhibitions and events, to debate and to party.
The installation received great interest and many enthusiastic visitors. After the Summer of Architecture ended there were several requests for re-use, for which the National Park Hunsrück-Hochwald was selected.
Nature-Culture-Space
During the summer of 2016, the installation was rebuilt as a Nature-Culture-Space at the Hunsrück-house in the National Park Hunsrück-Hochwald. Against the backdrop of the forest the installation creates a precisely defined, circular space. The installation can provide a place to meet in the context of landscape and nature - or just offer the opportunity to experience it as a beautiful object.
The circle stands for equilibrium and balance; all elements of the structure depend on each other. In analogy to the habitat of the national park, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The visual overlay of the wooden structure with the forest depicts the relationship between timber and trees. The forest or, more generally, nature is the cradle of our culture of building.
The delicate equilibrium of a forest habitat is a prerequisite for its biodiversity. The effort required to preserve a habitat such as the national park demonstrates that any natural environment needs to be treated with care and respect. Hans Carl von Carlowitz, in his work Silvicultura Oeconomica from 1713, was the first to define sustainability: to harvest no more wood than can grow back. The circular, space containing installation represents this cycle symbolically. The reassembly of the installation in the National Park, after its initial erection during the Rhine-Main Summer of Architecture 2015, proved to be a wonderful opportunity to draw attention to this broader context. And, in line with the goals of sustainability, also on this location the intervention manages to convey a sense of identity.
The project was supervised by Professor Kerstin Molter and Professor Dr. Julius Niederwöhrmeier with additional support by Mark Linnemann and the Art Society Eisenturm Mainz as cooperating partner. Participating cities in the Summer of Architecture 2015 were Frankfurt, Mainz, Offenbach and Wiesbaden.
