德国北杜伊斯堡工业园区景观改造设计

外文翻译原文

Landscape Park Duisburg Nord

Climbers on “Monte Thyssino”

Landscape architects: Latz + Partner Public park

Size: approx. 230 hectares

Completed in 1991 – 2002.

The summit of “Monte Thyssino”, a mountain that does not appear on any map, owes its name to the German steel magnate August Thyssen. When the industrialist, who was born in 1842 and built his first steelworks in the Ruhr basin at the age of 28, founded the Meiderich plant near Duisburg when industrialization was at its height in 1902, he was already one of the major figures in the district and the industry. The Meiderich factory produced 37 million tons of pig iron, latterly in five blast furnaces, before it was closed down. The factory gates were closed for over eight decades to anyone who did not earn a living from steel August Thyssen, who died in 1926, would certainly never have thought that one day leisure climbers would name a 14-metre-high coal bunker wall with a summit cross after him, and that the site of his iron and steelworks would once become the largest landscape park in the Ruhr basin.

The worldwide structural change in heavy industry turned the Ruhr basin into a crisis region. In 1985, the Meiderich plant in Duisburg was closed down and about 8000 steelworkers were laid off. This left desperate working families behind, and 230 hectares of post-industrial, derelict landscape, whose image is now shaped by countless industrial ruins, huge machine halls, blast furnaces, cooling towers and other landmarks. In 1991, the “Landschaftsp ark Duisburg Nord” redevelopment project was placed on the project list for the Emscher Park International Building Exhibition, and a competition involving five international planning teams was set up.

The prize-winning “syntactical design” by the German l andscape architects Latz + Partner is based on the idea of not obliterating the traces of industrial culture but reinterpreting them with carefully devised interventions. The breaks and scars in the maltreated landscape were not to be repaired, but crystallized out of the rubble as pieces of remembrance. The landscape architects did not draw up an overall design plan, but revealed one conceptual layer after another almost archaeologically, developing four different park concepts and then superimposing them on each other. The water park is made up of the tangle of canals and sewage and reservoir pools, while the rail park uses the old track systems. Roads, transport routes and bridges also represent a level in their own right as linking promenades, and so do the many cultivated fields and gardens. Specially designed connecting elements, ramps, steps, terraces or gardens join the four levels of the park visually, functionally, conceptually or symbolically.

Blast furnace 5, an 80-metre-high steel giant through whose innards you climb to the top provides a wonderful view of the park and the Ruhr basin. In the shadow of the blast furnace is Cowper Square, named after the great blast stoves. The area has been planted with a grid of fruit trees, which environmental protectionists first saw as entirely inappropriate in terms of the industrial past. The Bunker Gardens in the ore bunkers of the former sintering plant are equally experimental and provocative. Special saws were used to open up access to the massive concre te chambers and a whole variety of gardens and children’s play areas were