How to Make an old Schloss New

(if this image is just a pretty palace, click refresh to reload the anim­ated gif and enjoy a quick look at the rebuild­ing of the schloss)

I am always both fas­cin­ated and charmed to see an older build­ing lov­ingly restored and doubly so when its role is thought­fully recon­sidered and cre­at­ively re-purposed. The mag­ni­fi­cent ducal place in Braun­sch­weig has been care­fully recon­struc­ted and redeveloped as part of a shop­ping arcade in the city centre. The palace itself was torn down in 1960 fol­low­ing years of gradual dis­in­teg­ra­tion and bomb dam­age dur­ing the WWII that left much of the city centre dev­ast­ated. Although rem­nants of the old palace were used in the recon­struc­tion begun in 2005, the bulk of the con­struc­tion mater­ial is new. Des­pite this, the effect over­all effect of the recon­struc­tion is gor­geous, and trib­ute to the crafts­man­ship of those involved. There have been a num­ber of crit­ics that feel that such a build­ing should only be used as museum or a pub­lic non-commercial space. I heart­ily dis­agree.

I have been for­tu­nate enough to have stumbled across other fine examples of such re-purposing in my own travels. I was very struck by the grad in Lub­ljana, Slov­e­nia, which fea­tures a theatre, a gal­lery, a num­ber of won­der­ful cafes and a mag­ni­fi­cent green space in the con­fines of the restored castle. More recently, vis­it­ing a splen­did example of Moor­ish castle design in Silves, Por­tugal, I was dis­ap­poin­ted to dis­cover upon pay­ing my entry fee that most of the castle was off lim­its as it was under recon­struc­tion. The pro­ject here was sim­ilar. There is a huge open air theatre being recon­struc­ted in the castle court­yard.
Pro­jects such as this are bring­ing his­tor­ical arti­facts back to life and back into the local com­munity. There are valid con­cerns that recon­struc­tion can blatantly mis­rep­res­ent the past, or that a price­less con­nec­tion with the past is being lost through re-purposing. How­ever, such pro­jects call for sens­it­iv­ity to the social role of the his­tor­ical object. Feud­al­ism aside (yeah, that’s a biggy, but bear with me) the castle was the centre of com­munity. Bring­ing these spaces back into pub­lic use, even some­times with an odi­ous smell of com­mer­cial­ism, doesn’t neces­sar­ily abrog­ate their his­tor­ical role. I am reminded imme­di­atelly of Pal­ais Royal in Paris, remembered as the res­id­ence of the Duc d’Orleans prior to the French Revolu­tion. Com­mer­cial space was a per­man­ent part of the palace, help­ing defray the cost of upkeep, and polit­ic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant as one means by which the Duc main­tained a con­nec­tion to the com­mon folk. The Pal­ais fea­tured pub­lic space that was util­ized by the com­munity.
The devel­op­ment of the Schloss-Arcaden in Braun­sch­weig is $US270M pro­ject. Real­ist­ic­ally as much as we claim to treas­ure our past, there’s no other way that such sums can be raised to accom­plish these pro­jects with such sens­it­iv­ity. Being a fre­quent user of cafe spaces here in Canada, I can only mar­vel at the exper­i­ence to be had in the won­der­ful bal­cony space in this new old castle — a Star­bucks I under­stand, accord­ing to a Ger­man con­tact. OK, that fact raises some issues, but I won’t go there right now.

By the way, I used a series of web­cam shots of the con­struc­tion pro­ject to put together an anim­ated view of the rebuild­ing pro­cess — warning…it is a tad large at 3.2Mb. I hope that little anim­a­tion works for you and would love hear any feedback.

Update: The anim­ated GIF got picked up by a couple Ger­man sites, which was quite cool. This got me think­ing about dif­fer­ent ways that the Schloss-Arcaden might be represented.

• A 3D SketchUp! Model of the Schloss
• A couple pho­tob­log shots sug­gest­ing some intriguing spaces inside the schloss-arcaden
• Some great night shots
• A great video from the unveil­ing
• Some aer­ial con­struc­tion shots to appre­ci­ate the scale of the pro­ject

Its inter­est­ing to see the range of media imme­di­ately avail­able and shared about a pro­ject such as this. The world grows smal­ler still.

3D model of the Schloss-Arcaden uploaded by EMOTION to the Google 3D Warehouse.