Utopie

Halle is a city located in Sajonia-Anhalt state, on the banks of the Saale river. It was part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between 1949 and 1990.
In 1958, the GDR socialist government developed a plan to increase chemical production in the area. For this purpose, they began the integral project for building Halle-Neustadt, the “chemical workers socialist city.”

The architect Richard Paulick, a son of the Bauhaus where he worked closely with Walter Gropius, was hired to design the project.

The Halle-Neustadt urban planning model is a close relative of the utopic socialism by Owen, Fourier, or Cabet, which was later rethought by Le Corbusier and developed by architecture schools, like the Bauhaus.

The city is composed of carefully arranged, enormous prefab concrete beehives (like Block 10, the largest housing complex in Germany). A new town, autonomous, built out of nothing, design to hosting more than 90.000 inhabitants.

Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 led to a dramatic increase in unemployment. Halle became a shrinking city, reducing its population to more than a half in just two decades.

The space chosen by Freiraum Gallerie is based on the strategy thought by a committee made up of artists, architects, and urban planners from the city. It aims to connect two significant city areas through the intervention on the ramp access to Neustadter Passage. For this purpose, they carry out several surveys to get some insight and different opinions from the Halle Neustadt neighbors. They shared the results with us to develop the concept design. We aimed to make a complete intervention on the area, focusing primarily on the ramp, an essential element of this complex space.

We approach such a complex space by unfolding it, turning it into a more simple, flat, and abstract canvas. Then, we write three times the word “UTOPIE” and place it on the canvas. The word rotates as the canvas unfolds. We propose to apply a geometric transparency effect, which chromatic interactions refer to some of the city’s significant works of public art, such as the murals by Josep Renau or the masonry walls of many of the block’s façades. Once the word is placed on the canvas, we fold it back, creating a composition of typographic elements. The work turns almost abstract, unreadable but acts as a new skin by wrapping the space uniformly, flattening it, and generating new rhythmic patterns resulting from the different typography anatomy parts. The painting slightly changes when walking up and down the ramp giving access to the Neüstadter Passage.