Germany

      Heerenschürli serves as a hybrid sports complex and public park, giving the neighborhood facilities for organized sports as well as general leisure activities. A public square with seating and a restaurant are integrated into the complex; the lawns themselves are also public - openly accessible during the off-hours of the local athletic clubs.
      The power of this project is based on an intelligent answer to describe something which is not there. The monastery didn't survive to the present day, so Topotek 1 had to figure out how to translate its invisible characteristics to the language of landscape. A modest and beautifully measured height difference suggests a volume had been there. Furthermore, the consequent contrast between scenic panorama and minimalistic shaping add to the aesthetic tension. As if this contrast would reflect the one between Arcadian representation of nature and modesty of the life in a monastery. Perhaps. It definitely activates the imagination of the visitor, boosting the experience of the site hence making it more memorable and interesting.
      Measuring two hectares, the Flaschenhals accomplishes the Park am Gleisdreieck as third part of the design. It extends from Kreuzberg and Schöneberg till the boarders of Tempelhof.
      From the Landwehr Canal near Potsdamer Platz extending to the Yorck Bridges in the South, the ten hectares spanning western part of the Park am Gleisdreieck was built until spring 2013.
      This poetic intervention by Thilo Folkerts marks a former train station. The elements are placed partly on a green park structure and partly on paved, more urban area which suggests a departure/arrival from/to somewhere else. The sign marking the station name is redundant.
      The Park of Encounters is a complex design that deals with the public use of a once-army base. Built by the Nazi regime in 1937 and taken over by Allied forces after the war, Campbell Barracks later served as NATO HQ for Europe, which closed in the mid-2010s. Decades of army use left a palimpsest of traces that were waiting to be reinterpreted. The jury recognises how difficult and yet successful it was to redesign this army-charged site with 'respectful lightness' and a 'slight twist of humour' as if the designers wanted to decompress the site and add play in a witty, nearly mischievous way. That is evident, for example, in a stripe of play elements that run through the entrance checkpoint, emphasising its disuse, or colouring and displacing the found artefacts from the 1970s. In a different configuration, stripped of their original use, these artefacts represent the retreat of control, repression and are abstracted into new constellations, provoking new interpretations and ways of interaction. The jurors appreciated this underlying attitude, also resulting in elegant and much more subtle means of change, for example, mixing and shredding of the existing pavements and using them anew. The material/colour palette is exceptionally well thought-through; it communicates the different layers of the site's palimpsest and connects different parts into a coherent whole.

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