Kiellinie

The western waterfront promenade “Kiellinie” stretches for more than 3.5 km along the Kiel Fjord and connects to Kiel’s city centre. As a historically evolved and spatially very versatile status area, the promenade, which was last renovated in the 1970s, now needs to be modernised and given a uniform design. For Kiel, the Kiellinie has great potential as a representative feature, event space and infrastructure hub. The task of the competition was to consider these characteristics and to create a new quality for the Kiellinie. The space was divided into three sub-areas and several focal areas. A total of 15 international teams took part in the competition.

Today’s Kiellinie is visibly shaped by its historical development as well as its spatial configuration, which have definitely expanded in time as well as space. Due to its location, the Kiellinie plays an important representative role in promoting a new type of city promenade that not only defines the waterfront as the front of the city, but also creates a new connecting meeting space for urban society, innovation and culture. 
The aim of the design is to translate and promote these characteristics of the Kiellinie in a contemporary way, while recognising the different subspaces of the waterfront as such and interweaving them in terms of design. The high demands placed on this central space in the cityscape have been translated into a concise guiding principle through the design of the Kiellinie and, in turn, spatially translated, form an exciting and robust waterfront promenade for the city of Kiel.

The north of the new Kiellinie has a noticeably different character than its south. The dense urban forest of the Düsterbroker-Gehölz often reaches close to the water of the fjord here and the buildings are more reduced. This atmosphere invites local recreation and can now offer more targeted space for sports enthusiasts as well as nature lovers. Variants A and B of the northern section are as similar as possible in terms of design in order to clearly incorporate a uniform design. Variant A, without a road, allows the forest and the parks to be brought even closer to the water, to be experienced and, through the connection with the wooden “water line”, to be closely linked to the fjord.