David Whitley delves into Germany’s industrial heartland and discovers unusual cultural attractions springing up in Essen, Bochum, Duisburg and Oberhausen.
Landschaftpark Duisburg-Nord
From the top of the giant gas holder, two strange characters emerge. Both are clad in wetsuits, and are lugging diving gear with them. Inside is the home of the world’s least likely diving school.
Nearby, a woman dressed almost entirely in leather is posing for photographs half-way up the blast furnace. She’s getting in the way of the middle-aged tour group that are fully intent on reaching the top.
The Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, it’s fair to say, is not your average adventure playground. The 200 hectare site was formerly a Thyssen ironworks. Now people go free climbing in the ore bunkers, and the industrial buildings are used for concerts, markets and dance productions.
Capital of Culture 2010
This is a common theme in the Ruhr, Germany’s giant urban conurbation of 53 towns and cities and 5.3m inhabitants. It’s renowned as a place of steel, smokestacks and heavy industry.
It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when the Ruhr was announced as European Capital of Culture 2010. The unlikely bid beat off competition from the far more obvious likes of Cologne and Gorlitz. It seemed a crazy decision, even to most Germans.
It’s fair to say that the Ruhr has a very industrial take on culture. Many of the major venues have industrial links. The Villa Hügel on the shore of Lake Bredeney, for example, is the family home of the Krupp steel dynasty and is used to host various art exhibitions.
Then there are the likes of the Colosseum Theatre in Essen – a former Krupp factory which now hosts musical theatre – and the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum. The latter was formerly an exhibition hall for the Bochumer Verein ironworks; it’s now the main performance venue for the RuhrTriennale arts festival, which runs until 2011.
This is an area where ugly old industrial complexes don’t get knocked down; they have trees planted around them, and the buildings are repurposed as something else, no matter how awkward the conversion process might be.
Gasometer, Oberhausen
It leads to a series of extremely odd cultural venues, of which the Gasometer in Oberhausen is a classic example.
It is surrounded by lots of shiny new things – Oberhausen has tried to create a Neue Mitte, or new centre. This means that there’s a gigantic modern shopping complex, an arena for concerts and a Sealife aquarium. It all looks very pleasant and soulless, yet standing above them all is what was the biggest gas holder in Europe.
Standing at 117m, Oberhausen’s Gasometer is a giant. From the top, you can look out over the scarred landscape at the chimneys, canals and railway tracks.
But to get to the top, you first have to enter. The gas has been siphoned out, and an epic-scale display about the solar system has been shipped in. Extraordinary images of planets, comets and stars have been blown up into epic proportions, satellites and space telescopes hang on wires, and a model of the sun sits in the centre under the concentric rings of a rusty metal roof.
Taking pride of place is ‘The Biggest Moon On Earth’, a sculpture of the moon that’s 25m in diameter and hangs from the very top of the Gasometer. Taking everything in takes some serious neck arching. Well, if you’ve got a big space, you may as well fill it with something big…
Zollverein colliery, Essen
The centre of the Capital of Culture festivities, however, is the Zollverein colliery in Essen.
It’s somewhat optimistically billed as ‘the most beautiful colliery in the world’ and is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.
The complex closed down in 1986, was bought by the state government and preserved as a memorial. Since then, all manner of weird and wonderful things have cropped up. In winter, it’s possible to go ice skating through the coking plant next to an observation wheel which sits at the heart. In summer, visitors can go swimming in a pool created from shipping containers.
While the fun stuff can be found in the coking plant, the cultural gravitas comes from the increasing array of galleries, studios, museums and exhibition spaces around Shaft XII.
The old coal washery is the major hub, and the Ruhr Museum has been moved there, ready to open in time for 2010. Above it is the visitor centre, accessed via a 58m long and 24m high moving walkway. Inside, everything from the café to the helpdesk has been built around the machinery.
Red Dot Design Museum
The same principle has been applied elsewhere, most notably in the Red Dot Design Museum. Inside Zollverein’s old boiler house, the interior has been decked out by Sir Norman Foster. Metal walkways and glass panels snake around brutal, hulking boiler machinery. There’s a genuine wow factor, and the museum is the sort that makes you go round saying: “Want one, want one.”
Everything from cool bathtubs and kitchen equipment to iPod Nanos and tandem sunloungers are on display. The museum covers the greatest achievements in stylish, practical design from the last decade or so and just about everything looks phenomenally cool. It’s almost as if the museum’s sole aim is to induce avarice.
Ruhr regeneration
That such a huge exhibition – it’s the biggest design museum in the world – forms just a small part of the Zollverein complex is just an indication of the former colliery’s grand scale. A ‘sculpture forest’, broodingly dark restaurant and ceramic workshop are amongst the many goodies that can be found amongst the maze of conveyor belts, railway tracks and Bauhaus brick buildings.
It’s a regeneration project of staggering boldness, and one that has been replicated on a smaller scale throughout the Ruhr region. Stops along the Ruhr Industrial Heritage trail are not just monuments to the past; they’re an active part of the present and future. It soon becomes clear that choosing the area as Capital of Culture wasn’t such an absurd decision after all.
The classics may come with the clank of metal, and there may be more of an iron curtain than a red curtain, but the Ruhr has managed to turn its industrial behemoths into a series of unique cultural hotspots. It’s smokin’ in all the right ways.
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