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Land Art Museum

Part 2 Project 2008
Sarah Haubner
Brandenburgische Technische Universitat Cottbus | Germany
An abandoned power station from 1890, located north of Berlin, in a region of economic decline, receives a new identity as a museum for land art.
The landscape of Eberswalde is both unique and diverse. Beside indigenous areas of forests and swamplands the traces of the industrial past are visible and form a great challenge for the future. Imagined as large-scale exhibition space for land art the region will change its negative image of structural loss, as evident in wide parts of eastern Germany. Located in close proximity to the cultural capital of Berlin with its overabundance of art objects filling storage spaces and therefore inaccessible to the public, the land art museum drags visitors from the center to a place where land art can be exhibited in a more appropriate way, using the whole area as an experimental exhibition space.
The existing building offers spaces of specific qualities, which fit the demands for each medium: the main hall with its generosity and natural lighting is ideal for large-scale objects. The space beneath, a more intimate and lower lit space, structured by voluminous concrete foundations once having carried the turbines, allows the display of light-sensitive photographs and drawings. A thick concrete slab outside the building, the former coal storage, can carry heavy exterior objects. Adjusting buildings of less architectonic quality are used as storage and workshop spaces, connected to the hall by a tunnel. The lower floors of the small hall are used as a hotel for visitors and an artist in residence.
The addition, a tower-like building with a wide ramp forms the new entrance. The building houses the library, office spaces and a restaurant on top with a panoramic view over the landscape. The materiality derives from the impressions on site: massive concrete and rusty steel.

Sarah Haubner


In this years graduation assignment five abandoned industrial sites in the city of Eberswalde, Germany were given with the task to propose a new use. The buildings, all from the 19th century, have to be seen as cultural heritage with high architectural value. Unfortunately the loss of industrial activities and a general economic decline in wide parts of eastern Germany let to neglect these powerful reminders of former cultural achievements. Within five months, the students had to find a strategy for revitalizing one of the buildings and to elaborate an architectonic design.
Sarah Haubner chose the power station from 1890 and envisioned a new live as a museum for land art. In her analysis she proved an extraordinary sensibility for every scale, from the regional to the detailed scale in construction and materiality. Her great dedication with the subject of land art and a profound knowledge of the art landscape of Berlin, made her idea convincing. By relating the museum to Berlin and to the region, her argumentation gained a realistic basis, but not without loosing a vision of an art space that extends the constraints of a museum building. Her design approach can be described as being both highly sensitive to the site, by valuing and enhancing the existing through minimal interventions, and as ambitious, by seeking for a complete change of the situation with wide-reaching effects.

Tutor(s)


2008
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