Railway City Workshops
Building Character
Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark
Context
With a project centred around railway sheds built in the 1920’s, its hard to ignore the influence the industrial revolution and more specifically, the ‘machine’ has had on the built fabric that remains today. Large empty carriage yards and an intricate network of tracks leading in and out of buildings make up the landscape while sprawling workshops surround themselves with smaller, more intricately detailed sheds and admin buildings. The task was to create a master plan for the site that weaved in several mixed use neighbourhoods with schools, shops, homes and businesses around the remnants of the ‘railway city’.
Start Point
From the start, there was two images that shaped the atmosphere for the project, the first is a photograph taken in the 1920’s of urban life in Copenhagen. The second is a painting from 1918 of the south harbour. For me, these images where important because they embodied the life and energy of the place at its conception as a railway yard.
Copenhagen 1916 - Source: kbh billeder
Copenhagen 1920’s - Source TBC
Influence
Both images have this balance between pedestrian, machine and nature. The urban life looks chaotic but also really well proportioned, there’s a harmony on the streets between light rail, commuter, bicycle and slower moving cars, where neither is a dominant force in the space. Meanwhile the painting presents a landscape where any space not covered by building or road is occupied by dense market gardens, fields or forests. Buildings are clustered into tightly packed clusters and the landscape flows between. In some ways I think this site is one of the few in the city where life of this time can still be imagined. More critically, I think these are some of the attributes urbanites yearn for today in their idealistic inner city neighbourhood. A place that’s close enough to the action, but not entirely covered by a hard and impenetrable surface, a place where streets aren’t filled with parked cars but where great opportunity for a close, social neighbourhood life exists.
The Main Character
The main character is the sprawling workshops. Proportionally they align themselves with the scale of engines and carriages they formally housed, rather than than the more human centric scale desired for inner city life. The volumes are to vast for most sustainable commercial use and to flat for responsible, dense residential use.
Building on a legacy
Left with a single, sprawling flat space, with light poring in from the saw tooth skylights above, it was hard to pass up the opportunity to create something special for both neighbourhood and broader city. Several programmatic trends existed for these post industrial spaces, including gallery and exhibition spaces, street food halls, ruinous gardens and even community libraries. Not far from the site, however, already existed a plethora of large public galleries, public libraries and exhibition spaces. There seemed to be more opportunity in proving a food hall, with the closest competitor a temporary instillation just over 4km away. There was also very few internal, ruinous gardens that existed within the city.
The food hall is straight forward, small vendors operating out of old shipping containers surrounded by tables and chairs. A similar typology exists in Aarhus and programmatically, it would consume just under half of the space. The more interesting programme is the ruinous garden. For me the leading example of this is the Paddington resivior gardens in Sydney, Australia. The designers used a combination of water tanks, dense mass planting and contemporary frames of historical elements to reflect what was lost. It’s such a successful precedent in my view because it simultaneously reflects a former life and use, recognisable in its refurbishment. It’s also a valuable green asset for the neighbourhood and community that surrounds it.
Reservoir Gardens - TZG Architects
Reservoir Gardens - TZG Architects
Application & Details
Taking both the need to communicate the structures former life and, the need to create a valuable space for the community, the scheme plays on the rhythm and silhouette of the saw tooth roof above and the atmosphere of long metal carriages dominating the space. Voids reflecting the roofline silhouette are cut into the floor and filled with water or mass planting. Floating over this are narrow boardwalks that squeeze their way between the larger ‘carriage boxes’ into pockets of quiet open space. The ‘carriages’ can be filled with interchangeable programs from single artist exhibitions to bike workshops to micro bars and cafes, ideally these spaces would embody the spirit of the temporary, counter culture, often seen aside railway lines and train yards. The decks that comprise the pockets of open space, sit just enough above the top of the voids cut into the floor, so that any hole or edge can act as an informal place to sit. The spaces are simple enough that they could be home to small performers, the regular salsa group or even a collection of neighbours meeting for a child’s birthday party.
Outside of the workshops the landscape changes dramatically, what was carriage yards would be converted into higher density mixed use space. A materiality referencing that of the existing building stock would be applied to facades in alternate compositions. Reflecting the sites industrial revolution is reserved for the details, for example streets are wholly shared space, with a varying texture on the same plane to signal alternate programme. Buildings are right against the street but would have a textural quality that balances the need for commercial transparency with respect for adjoining fenestration. Outside of the neighbourhood line exists dense planting and permeable surface, grass fields broken by mass planting and linked with remnants of former railway lines.
Final Thoughts
In some ways the building and its immediate context acts as the catalyst for the remaining neighbourhoods of the railway city. The simple mixed use streets that balance the relationships between users, by returning to uniform planes. The lively neighbourhoods with strong edges, separated by layers of dense planing allowing the landscape to flow between. And the soft local centres, or the spaces in between, that become home to children paying in the evening or neighbours meeting over a morning coffee. The exploration of all these parts of life was so crucial to developing this project, and a great point to jump into design development for final presentations and exams.
