Status
Project
Year
2007
Program
Urban-Infrastructural
Scale
400000m²
Partners
MCKNHM
Mark Mueckenheim
Club L94
Mathis Osterhage
Niels Jonkhans
Team
Mark Mückenheim, Frank Flor, Götz Klose, Jörg Homann, Burkhard Wegener, Eva Schiemann, Jochen Beimforde, Mathis Osterhage, Niels Jonkhans

Our aim for the sustainable restructuring of a waste management facility to a new center of excellence for learning and innovation of environmental technologies was to avoid the obvious impulse: to seemingly beautify and hide the current situation through intense forestation. Instead, the existing waste disposal heap is cultivated as a new landmark. The gradations of vertical vegetation zones inform the design and layered zoning of the landfill. The transition from the naturalness of the forest to the artificiality of the covered stockpile is carried out in three zones: the vegetation-less hill is concentrically surrounded by the Ring Park, a grassy meadow, and a subsequent ring of high-growing energy crops with deliberate clearings for future commercial and research buildings. The existing dense forest surrounds this ring and represents the last spatial layer. The concept heavily utilizes alternative energy systems. An infiltration basin captures rainwater and can be appropriated as a swimming pond with a beach.