Anwohnerpark

OSA

The car park for the press on the Cologne fair ground is located at the spot where the connecting road between Deutz and Mühlheim passes under the bridge Zoobrücke surrounded by streets with different functional and spatial levels. A bewildering but also typical situation of unaccounted for urban space. A functional site in essence, devoid of particular attractiveness - urban „leftovers”.

The triangular carpark has a short, open side towards the Deutz-Mühlheimer-Strasse, and a longer and spatially more active side created by the soaring Zoobrücke, featuring typical “under the bridge situations” such as deposited office containers. A stately firewall flanks the longest side of the triangle. This wall is part of the presumably biggest studio complex in Germany, the "KunstWerk".

Talking about urban space something completely different starts here: A mix of old, mostly converted industrial compounds and housing areas. At this site of hard clashing and completely different urban spaces, the osa_office for subversive architecture group carried out a so to speak complex intervention in the context of "plan06" whose evolution could be watched during the plan06 week.

"Our project < Resident’s Park > seizes the existing ornament of the fair ground car park and continued it on the firewall of the neighboring studio complex that flanks the Zoobrücke. The esthetic sinews of this unremarkable as well as abstract graphics does not only integrate an icon of public awareness at a prominent spot of a structurally difficult urban space – but also solved apropos of nothing the issue of parking space for residents in a simple and sustainable fashion, given the continued pressure of the fair ground on the neighboring areas.“

The new car park accounts for the requirement of the city government of provable parking space and the scarce horizontal areas as well as the actual demand of parking space by the artists who live and work here and mostly use public transport or ride by bicycle.“

In the strict sense it is actually “classic space design” – on a budget. During two-thirds of the year the press car park adjacent to the firewall is empty, in such a way that precisely this status became a material jumping-off point for the design. The whole space is redesigned. Via added elements such as the parking space markings and the luminaire that reads „P-Künstler, artists“ mounted on the wall, the existing and formerly mere functional elements of the press carpark become part of the design oeuvre. The former back side of the studio building receives a new obverse and an unequivocal address. The occasion was utilized to transform the old Deutz logo on the right end of the firewall into the KunstWerk logo. “KunstWerk is the place with plenty of available parking space!”

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