Barker Kaserne

The Springbach Terrassen transform a mono-functional military area into a future quarter for the emerging regional center of Paderborn, interweaving with the surrounding landscape while respecting the existing urban framework. Also known as the Cooperative City, the project started with a design process that stems from the question of how the “Future Quarter Paderborn” can emerge as a new quarter that is not first built and then revitalized, but that can harmonize with the city from the beginning.

The conceptual approach started with investigating the five universal urban challenges, more specially regarding how “City and Landscape” can function as a complex system that can contribute and solve strategic and spatial. The Cooperative City uses what is available regionally and locally and tests how existing resources can be (re)used and recycled through local (urban mining) and regional cycles (using the local economy), to which they can be obtained. The cooperative city should not only be a space for the development of new ideas for the common good, living quality, but also a platform for the emergence of a neighborhood before the future quarter is built.
 

In the Cooperative City, the existing structure is the base for the new plan. The plan is not only physically connected to its surroundings and history but is in every way an extension of it. Its structure rises from the framework of the Barker Barracks, transforming buildings, infrastructure, and green spaces, expanding into the surrounding area to connect with Paderborn and its surrounding countryside. A careful reading of the barrack’s logic reveals a clear structure along a series of strips that move from east to west. Each represent a variety of functions transforming the former barracks and thus take on both their own spatial logic and typological form. They form the basis that will guide the future development of the plan’s structure.

A clear and robust structure in which diversity and a high degree of mixing can take place. Each of these strips adopts a recognizable typological strategy that combines open space, nature and development in new and exciting ways, but is based on the site’s DNA. In the south, the barrack strips adopt the specific courtyard typology, (of the original barracks) and defines dynamic block structures that combine old and new in a diverse and interesting way. In the center of the plan, a vibrant north-south oriented strip reinterprets the Garage typology into a vibrant mix from east to west: the Academic Mile and the Boulevard.