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On 27 September 2006, the first International Urban Landscape Award was granted in Frankfurt am Main. In 2006, the prize was limited to projects completed in Germany. A total of 79 applications were received.
The jury granted the award with a purse of 50,000 euros to Riemer Park in Munich for being an exemplary converted urban open space. There were honourable mentions for four other projects.
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The Riemer Park was developed on the former Munich-Riem airport from designs by the French landscape architecture firm Latitude Nord, it has the form of a unique modern park but is nevertheless in the tradition of classic landscape parks.
With predominating axial pathways and geometrically designed small woods, the park exhibits an independent character that will become even more pronounced in the course of time. At the same time, this large open space links the new city district Messestadt Riem to the surrounding municipalities.
Spaciously subdivided into areas including playgrounds, a lake and snow sledging hills, the park not only allows multiple uses today but also has potential for as yet unimagined future user interests.
The award distinguishes the courageous landscape architectural design as well as the wise decision by the Munich municipal council projecting a very large recreational park on this site.
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After years of heated discussion, the Holocaust memorial based on plans by Peter Eisenman was set up in a prominent location in Berlin. The overwhelming field of steles became one of the city’s major attractions, forming a new open space.
The field of 2,711 rectangular concrete steles of differing heights is open for pedestrian entry on all sides. The paths between the steles rise and fall with the topography. An 800-square-metre Information Centre, set up underground of the field, documents the murder of Jews from all over Europe.
Peter Eisenman does not see his design for the memorial as a place of guilt and sadness but a place of hope. He says it is a place that is not a place, a place seemingly detached from the urban spatial network. He wants to expose visitors to an unfamiliar environment, where the established ideas of space and time are questioned.
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The Westpark Bochum was built at the edge of inner-city Bochum on the grounds of the former Bochumer Verein and Krupp Steel.
Forming the heart of the park is the Jahrhunderthalle, the former factory of the steelworks. Concerts and exhibitions attract attention to this special architectural landmark. The industrial landscape around it has three levels to its artificial topography. Stairways negotiate the differences in levels, each designed with an individual character adapted to its location.
Several points of access open up the park to the city. An itinerary along the uppermost level joins all sections of the park together. Linking the levels to each other are three footbridges. The structures of these bridges represent an elegant contrast to the more robust form of the industrial park.
Visitors taking the itinerary around the park pass by thin tree groves and dense thickets. The vegetation established itself over the past 20 years. This spontaneously formed vegetation will be preserved; it gives the Westpark its special quality.
A lighting concept that integrates the park into the city provides safety and orientation even at night.
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Maurice Rose Airfield stands for an extraordinary conversion of a surface formerly used by the armed forces. The history of its military use can still be experienced. The concrete and asphalt relics will generate an interesting plant mosaic.
The underlying character and architectural structure of the grounds remained legible: a technologically imprinted place with strict geometry inserted into a natural space. A new bridge across the Nidda now links the grounds to the network of pedestrian and bicycle routes in the greenbelt.
The special feature in the new recreational open space, however, is the way it deals with surfaces covered with asphalt and concrete. More than half of the hard surfaces were broken up, shattered into slabs and grains of different sizes, and incorporated into the project. This creates a mosaic with a wide variety of habitats where ruderal vegetation can settle in with very different patterns in the course of succession.
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At a height of 107 metres, the Müngsten railway bridge crosses the valley of the River Wupper. In this traditional tourist site, a new park with a pronouncedly dominant design creates a highflying leisure destination.
Removing derelict buildings along the river and dense vegetation from the site exposed the Wupper to view. Because the Wupper is a protected zone according to Fauna Flora Habitat (FFH) guidelines, the planners had to prevent access to the Wupper. A new parking lot outside the park now assures tranquillity on the grounds.
They accomplished this with wedges of lawn and footbridges up to ten metres long which soar above the water. On two platforms by the riverbank, visitors are very close to the river; they take a unique suspended ferry to reach the opposite bank.
Müngsten Bridge Park emphasises its independence and uniqueness in the midst of the natural space. Together with the monument of technology that is the bridge, it refers to the industrial history of the region known as Bergisches Land.
