Market and cloth market, Zeulenroda

AppreciationGerman Landscape Architecture Award 2011

Jury verdict: The town centre of Zeulenroda has become an attractive urban centre through the activation of the public spaces between the market square and the Topfmarkt. With the cleverly staged sequence of squares, the authors succeed in restoring a high degree of lost identity to the place. The alternation of open and dense situations offers different atmospheric qualities and allows for a very wide variety of uses.

With the pleasantly quietly conceived market square, an urban city space has been created that holds back in terms of design and yet develops an unobtrusive presence. In the formation of the surface, a framing is set that incorporates the surrounding facades through a differentiation in the square pavement and thus emphasizes the effect as an overall ensemble. The topographical situation is exploited with the staircase oriented towards the town hall and Topfmarkt, and with the integration of a fountain it is shaped into a very special place.

The placement of the tree grove has created a vegetative space in the place of a building that used to exist next to the town hall, which with its impressive canopy and the sparsely arranged play elements creates a completely new amenity value. In this way, the Topfmarkt also regains its original size as a manageable urban square.

This site demonstrates how, despite the loss of a building that characterizes the cityscape, new urban structures can be created using the means of "green urban repair", which subsequently generate very independent urban qualities.