IGA Metropole Ruhr 2027 Gelsenkirchen

The impressive backdrop of industry and landscape – including the former Nordstern colliery and its numerous tailing piles – decisively shapes the identity of the village. The human-altered landscape is permeated by technological structures, traffic routes and relics of the coal and steel industries. It is a landscape bent to the laws of engineering that now faces a dynamically developing post-industrial nature.

The design deliberately plays with the parallelism of the structures at hand – former railway tracks, dykes, sheet pile walls as waterway banks and pipe systems – while also embracing unfinished intermediate states and wildness as contrasting stylistic devices. These two poles shape the face of the new park. A varied contrast of expanse and density creates an exciting sequence of widely disparate spatial impressions and atmospheres, which can be mixed and matched for looped paths of different lengths.