FRANKFURT-BOCKENHEIM URBAN QUARTER
An identitary quarter in the “city without characteristics”
Location: Frankfurt am Main
Planning: 2003
Architecture: Lechner und Lechner
Award: State of Hesse
Status: 5th prize – international competition (213 participants)
The “Quartier Backnang West” is located in a formerly industrially used area in the city of Backnang in the northeast of the Stuttgart urban region. (First of all, the design links the historical city centre with its outskirts, new developments: Backnang West and „Obere Walke“. It seeks for the complementarity of different parts which only together are able to create a higher form of life/balanced form of living. The new artery of such a body, called the productive route, will not only link new segments to the cardiovascular system but also will allow the city to constantly pulsate life through it. The broken line, which attracts nowadays and future city-making functions such as new and clean production, connects the dense city centre with vast greenery on both wings. Moreover, geometrical shapes of the proposed productive route correspond with a curved riverbed of Murr adjacent to natural landscape and its system of green paths and parks. These two helixes interweave in mutual cooperation to create a city genetic code, the Backnang’s DNA.)