P-West 2020 Competition | Dortmund, Germany | 2006
Work | Workout
Representing TU Delft
Designed by Auzie Triratnamurti with Da Wang and Sybren Boomsma
In late 2005, Points of Contact/ Beruehrungs Punkte launched P-West 2020 architectural competition under the questions of: How will we live and work in the future? What role will technology play in architecture? The participants of this competition were students of three invited universities from three different countries, the Netherlands (TU Delft), Austria and Germany.
The site is a 210-acre industrial area of the former Phoenix steel work, a central feature of the Dortmund-Hörde district, which was shut down in April 2001. Three choices of building objects on the site were oriented to the future redevelopment: switch house, blast furnace or gasometer. The Phoenix West urban redevelopment provides a concrete point of reference for a basic debate, involving input of ideas, on the conversion of former industrial buildings and on the topic of technology.
The old Blast Furnace structure can be seen as the structural element not only for a design, but even more for the cities of Hörde and Dortmund and the area around them. All what this area is today owes it to the mining industrial era, with the use of the blast furnace as the focal point. This is why we have chosen the blast furnace as our object of intervention in this competition. Our vision is to incorporate the mindset that will lead P-West and its surroundings into the 21st century of technological development in the areas of nano and micro technology.
Germany, and the Ruhr in special, is very sport-fanatic. In sport we seek its contradiction to the technological life of the daily work in P-West. In sports you test, train and overcome yourself. Sport makes you aware of your capabilities and shortcomings: it reveals who you are. Or, to put it in a more general way, building a Sport Centre forms a perfect way for young P-West employees to work and to work out: to work on regular basis on their jobs and to work out to get back in shape.
The use of spheres will connect the old industrial building to today’s technology. It is directed inward, to a central focal point. Closing itself of from the outer world, it creates a new ‘universe’.where there will only be sports that bring you closer to an understanding of yourself. The old structure fell into different parts the moment it stopped working. By stripping it down to its structural components the historical chains are put aside and the freedom to adapt to the future is given. The spheres, visions of a new world where man lives in full understanding of himself, float, indifferent to the existing structure, in a covering space-structure.