Imaginative concepts for an urban district of tomorrow

During the excursion, led by Stefanie Helga Paul and Hendrik Lindner, both academic staff at the Chair of Structural Design, the students produced impromptu designs on site in just three hours. Master's students were given the same task in the studio in Cottbus three weeks before the excursion. Using city plans, exciting designs were created whose creativity and integration into the spatial situation inspired the building department of the Hanseatic city of Stade in the town hall at the beginning of July. While the Master's students explained their designs from Cottbus via conference call, the Bachelor's students presented their ideas live on site. About 15 great ideas emerged - exactly what the city of Stade had been looking for: larger and smaller solutions full of creativity, originality and ingenuity.

"The challenge of the task," explains Stefanie Paul, "was to skilfully integrate the new residential area, which is separated from existing buildings and an educational campus by intersecting railway tracks and a main road, into the overall cityscape and to develop it in terms of urban planning. The boundaries imposed by the infrastructure should be overcome and, in the best case, dissolved." The project was made possible with significant support from Prof. Karen Eisenloffel, holder of the Chair of Structural Engineering.

Names such as "Magneton", "The Sun Bridge" or "A Star for Stade" bear witness to the creativity and forward-looking ideas with which the students set to work. The students are Thomas Goldberg, Sarah Ajjan Alhadid and Kai Philippi.  

After the public presentation of the designs in the town hall of the Hanseatic city of Stade, the Stader Tagesblatt wrote, among other things: "Without scissors in the head, amazing ideas have emerged. This is exactly what the Hanseatic City of Stade expected from this cooperation."

The students' designs were created as part of a cooperation between the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and the building department of the Hanseatic City of Stade. Whether the designs or parts of them will be implemented has not yet been decided. In any case, they offer plenty of fresh inspiration and a vision of the future very close to a concrete urban development situation.

At the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Urban Planning, design work on real projects and the solution of complex problems from drafting and design to technical implementation in building practice belong closely together. Applications for the degree programmes in Architecture, Civil Engineering and Urban Design and Planning are open until 26 September 2022 for the Bachelor's degree programmes and until 31 August 2022 for the Master's degree programmes.