Adaptive Reuse of the ,,Theresienstraße Heating Plant", Munich
Due to renewable energy sources, inner-city power plants will lose their importance in the near future and raise the question of meaningful revitalization and reintegration into the urban context. The thesis deals with the subsequent use of the “Theresienstraße Heating Plant Munich“. Its design goal is to make large parts of the area accessible and doing so, win back an inner-city area for the public with a somewhat utopian approach regarding the constantly rising real estate prices in Munich.
Local
Germany
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Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
A phenomenon that has been known for years in European cities is the migration of inner-city industry to the outskirts of the city.
The resulting industrial wastelands have been the design task of many architects since then: artist areas, lofts and concert halls.
With the ever more stringent environmental requirements to achieve climate protection goals, a new typology is being targeted,
the benefits of which are steadily decreasing and may disappear completely in some future. Smaller, inner-city coal- or gas-powered power and heating plants in particular will lose their importance in the future, as cities across Europe are increasingly converting their energy generation from renewable energy sources, including Munich.
On November 27, 2019, the city council passed the resolution to completely convert Munich‘s district heating supply to a mixture
of renewable energies, e.g. from geothermal energy, hydropower, biomass and solar energy by 2035. In the course of this, the inner-city “Theresienstraße Heating Plant” will also loose importance, so a new usage scenario for this area is the logical consequence.
Due to its volumetry, height (tower height approx. 57m) and its central location in Maxvorstadt, the “Theresienstraße Heating Plant”
has great urban development potential, as a new building could hardly be built to this extent at this point. The heating plant is
located within a closed block border adjacent to the “Kunstareal“ in a heterogeneous urban context. The aim of the design is to
make large parts of the area accessible in order to regain a piece of the inner city for the public with a somewhat utopian approach
regarding real estate prices, which are constantly rising in Munich.
reintegration
reconnection
adaptive
student housing
modular
The concept thrives to achieve ecologically sustainable advantages in the construction and further use process through the possibility of expandability / shrinkage in order to be able to react flexibly and sustainably to changes in usage and needs.
The key part in this idea are the standard containers that are used mainly as student dormitories. The amount of containers can be adjusted to the temporary needs of the city respectively the city's universities in terms of student numbers; the building can adapt to the current need of the city. In comparison to conventional building concepts it is way more energy efficient and a lot faster to set up the container towers. On the other hand it is easily possible to deconstruct them and provide them to various different new usages, such as temporary office rooms, schools or emergency living spaces.
The former tower of the heating plant in the middle of the student dormitory will become a vertical green space that is publicly accessible for the entire neighborhood and will be transformed from interior to exterior, while statically relevant fixtures, such as the coal bunker or the electrostatic filter system, will be retained.
The general goal is to use the given structure to a maximum and therefore decrease the amount of needed energy to deconstruct or demolish parts of the area.
In order to establish the new usages in the neighborhood and to interweave them in a meaningful way, the following strategies should correspond to the objectives of the design:
An important strategy is the introduction of local and supra-local attractors, which should make the area interesting and attractive both for the direct residents as well as the residents of the entire district. These attractors make a decisive contribution to the revitalization of the area at different times of the day and night.
In addition, there is a public swimming pool on the roof of the former machine hall, connected to the vertical green space, based
on the model of American neighborhood pools, which is an additional point of attraction of the area in the neighborhood.
The last strategy is the meaningful linking, overlapping or combination of different uses in order to create places of encounter and
community. The goal is to reflect the city disctrict's high density of different usages, cultural groups and interests in the usage concept: The gym halls can be rented flexibly from sportsclubs, associations or the students, there is the swimming pool, coworking spaces, a hall for various events, an architecture gallery, cafés and student's workshops. The vast variety of usages promote social exchange and link the area in the social fabric of the district.
The building understands itself as a realised utopia - so called heterotopia - regarding the increasing real estate prices in Munich
and therefore as a counter proposal to luxury apartments and gentrification. Creating affordable student's dormitories in an highly attractive city district is one of the key goals of the concept. The focus is to provide space and usage options for all different social groups and backgrounds, keeping financial or cultural boundaries as well as boundaries regarding accessability to a minimum.
Two buildings in the area contain a day-care center, doctor‘s offices and offices, as well as an inclusive residential building for
students who are dependent on nursing staff. As in the existing building, the latter is connected to the tower via a bridge and the residents of the inclusive living spaces have access to the pool area as well.
The concept contains various variants of living containers to provide fitting solutions for different living concepts. In general all containers are fully accessible, the are single appartments, appartments for couples, small families or bigger appartments for student groups. The are containers for students in wheelchairs as well as for students with special needs, e.g. students, that need the support of nursing staff. The goal is to fully integrate all student groups in the lving tower and not to create special areas by sorting the the different containers in a certain way.
A core benefit of the concept is that the city can react on increasing numbers of student applications and provide additional living space, to a certain extent. Therefore, the amount of people living in the building has a direct impact on the concept.
Another way of participating in the appearance of the concept is the flexibility of the different usages. It is possible to start community projects, such as neighborhood cafes, opening the student's workshops for public usage or promoting locally produced goods in a eco shop. The concept promotes the involvement of the people living in the buidling and the whole district and doing so benefits from the result, when it works.
In addition to that, the vertical green space in the tower has the potential of urban gardening which is a highly demanded concept in bigger cities.
An important factor regarding the reintegration into the district is to increase visibility, since the largest building proportion of the
area is in an introverted backyard situation. Due to its former protective function against noise, the facade of the substation
appears almost hermetically sealed. This dismissive position was part of several news articles since the residents of the disctrict complained about the situation and the city was asked to rethink options of recreating the outer area of the power plant. In the concept the outer facade is rearranged to function as a generous “showcase“ to the public area and communicate with the city, as it is the only part of the heating plant that borders the public street space.
Another aspect of involving stakeholders in the deveopment of the concept was to take the city's land use plan in consideration to adress potential lacks of usages. A key result of the analysis was the lack of green spaces around the area. Therefore a core aspect of the concept was to create a vertical garden in the plant tower. By arranging plants on different layers of the tower, a efficient usage of the given space is accomplished.
As mentioned, an important aspect of the concept is to reuse as much of the existing structure as possible. The former usage of the building as a gas powered heating plant provided different challenges in that process. The owner of the plant, a public energy providing company, supported answering some of the questions, e.g. how to handle the structure, the coal bunker and the electrostatic filter system in the building tower.
An innovation in this context is to use a given object with a given task in a new way. The usage of standard containers as living spaces and stacking them to create a living tower is a challenging but innovative concept. You need to find solutions to garantuee the structural integrity without loosing the benefit of flexibly adapting to current needs. The standardized, modular structure enables a fast building process, which is also benefitial in monetary ways. These benefits are enhanced by the possiblity of deconstructing or partially deconstructing the buidling in the same fast and easy way. The last aspect in this context is, that the system enables prebuidling of the structures in a highly standardized way and doing so, decrease the building costs even more. This focus in cost effectiveness enables student housing in an highly attractive inner city district.
The concept of a building structure that can be set up in a fast and easy way and that can flexibly adapt to certain needs could be benefitial in many different contexts, e.g providing housing in emergency situations or hospitals, or as interim quarters for schools or kindergartens.
Another aspect is the idea of creating a space that focuses on integration of all social groups of an ecosystem and promoting interaction and exchange.
Last but not least, the need for living space in agglomerations will increase furthermore, and the pressure to relocate big industrial areas to the city borders will continue. Especially in europe the need for conventional power plants in city center areas will decrease with the constantly increasing amonunt of renewable energies. This concept provides a solution of using these spaces without fully demolishing all given buildings but to use the structures in an intelligent and flexible way.
One of the biggest global challenges of our time is the permanently increasing demand for resources and energy. By constantly demolishing old and creating new infrastructure and buildings we intensify this challenge, since we waste already stored energy in exisiting structure, use additional energy to demolish it, and use even more energy to build up new structures. We need to find intelligent ways of reusing the existing structures, enhancing them to fit our current needs and be flexible for possible future needs. The given concept provides one possible approach to face these challenges.
