A new urban Quarter Frankfurt-Nordwest
The Main-Taunus foothills have been a cultural landscape undergoing constant change for thousands of years. Nature and culture overlap and intermingle, such that one can hardly be separated from the other. The development of this district of neighbourhoods dovetails with this dynamic without any individual elements losing intensity.
The design is based on compact urban settlements with mixed uses, the comprehensive preservation of the expansive landscape to the west of the A5 and the interrelationship between new and existing neighbourhoods. The interconnection occurs via open spaces, which mediate between the built structures and establish a relationship to the landscape. Reference to the landscape is a defining element of the design and plays a decisive role in identity formation for the neighbourhoods. The varied combination of new quarters of differing density, post-war settlement structures, village centres that have grown over centuries, agricultural areas, renaturated stream valleys, the new garden landscape and the extensive recreational landscape renders a multi-coding dynamic with distinctive urban spaces in Frankfurt’s northwest.
The high quality of the soil is used to strengthen local food production in the immediate residential surroundings. The fields of vast size are segmented into manageable units to facilitate new types of urban agriculture. The northern edge of the new neighbourhoods becomes home to a patchwork of recreational and kitchen-garden segments with different, communal forms of cultivation. An elaborately designed activity landscape reinforces the settlement perimeter and links the existing with the new urban quarters. As a well-connected open-space continuum, it leads from the bathing lake, via the small woods along the motorway, to the floodplains of the Urselbach valley.
Accumulated rainwater in the neighbourhoods is fully utilised via a multi-coded, green-blue system. Precipitation runoff is diverted along the topographical watershed. Retention roofs and systems of open troughs and ditches release the accumulated water to open channels or underground pipe systems. The aim is to make the entire rainwater system visible, usable and tangible in its sustainable approach. The mechanically and biologically treated water ultimately flows into the central bathing lake, further enhancing its appeal for residents of both the new and existing neighbourhoods.
