City Generator

How to deal with a remnant of the industrial past? How to preserve its unique qualities while making it more functional and integrated into the new urban fabric? What is the role of the new development? How to achieve the equilibrium between the present and the past, city and nature?

Instead of getting rid of it, we’ve chosen to urbanize the old mill complex. We carved the streets through its volumes, preserved and reprogrammed its uniquely voluminous interiors and highlighted the most pronounced pieces of its built structure. The mill complex kept its appearance virtually intact. From a building, it turned into a unique piece of urbanity, into a city. Its robust appearance remained contrasting the surrounding nature, while its permeable body became flexible enough to absorb a variety of program. The mill reinvented its meaning and relevance for the city.
The residential area at the other end of the island is envisioned as a compact one, resembling and balancing out the appearance of the mill complex. It consists of a collection of residential typologies. They formulate an intensive urban space and offer a variety of ways to live, while preserving the unity of the overall urban form. Presenting itself with a urban density, yet In the proximity of genuine natural landscape, the residential zone becomes an ultimately attractive urban environment, easily distinguishable and in the area.
These two contrasting built environments came about through the opposite processes, one through removing and the other one by adding the built volumes. They construct a distinctive urban ambient, a peculiar balance. The ring of river landscape that surrounds them amplifies and exhibits the tension, resulting in a unique equilibrium between built and open space, man-made and nature, past and present.