Ansgar Stadler presented converted industrial buildings in Leipzig in his series. Now he looks to the future: which buildings can still be used?
Ansgar Stadler spent six months in Leipzig looking at how industrial heritage can be repurposed. In his latest article, he looks to the future to show what potential the city still has to offer.
After almost six months in Leipzig, I have learned a lot about the city’s industrial heritage. Thanks to innovative concepts that preserve and use industrial buildings, many buildings have been saved from demolition and are still part of the heterogeneous cityscape today. The Spinnerei, for example, makes an important contribution to Leipzig’s cultural diversity and at the same time manages to preserve the industrial charm of the old factory buildings.
Despite these successful conversions, I keep noticing dilapidated facades as I walk through the city and many former factories are still empty. But it is precisely these seemingly forbidding sights that make Leipzig so exciting. Because here you can sense that there is still potential for development. The city has not yet been thought through to the end. This distinguishes Leipzig from my other adopted home of Munich, where every façade in the city center seems to have been perfectly restored and every open space already built on.
For architects who are prepared to engage with history, Leipzig is a real treasure trove. The structural qualities of the old buildings and their industrial charm speak in favor of preserving them.
The future development of our cities depends on how we treat and value the existing substance. That is why I have selected three listed buildings from a large number of unused industrial buildings in Leipzig that I would like to present. All of them are still unused at the moment, but show great and at the same time different potentials:
The Postbahnhof Leipzig was built between 1906 and 1912 as a central transshipment point for letters and parcels. Eight arched roofs, supported by impressive steel columns, cover 26 railroad tracks on 16 platforms. This made it the world’s largest railroad post office of its time. Today the building is empty. A market hall or a covered sports facility would be conceivable to revitalize the covered area. However, the immediate proximity to Leipzig’s main railway station also makes it interesting for office use.
Gasometer North (Gasworks 1 – Gas Container 10)
Gasometer Nord is one of several facilities in Leipzig that were built around 1900 to store gas. Stadtwerke Leipzig renovated the massive circular building and its Schwedler dome in 2013 and has since been looking for a new owner with a utilization concept. The round typology offers many exciting possibilities for conversion, as Yadegar Asisi’s Panorama Museum in the south of Leipzig has already demonstrated.
Karl Krause printing machine factory
When you first see the bookbinding machine factory coming from one of the disused and now wildly overgrown railroad tracks, you quickly forget that you are in the middle of East Leipzig. The listed building lies like a green island in an otherwise densely built-up area. The industrialist Karl Krause had the building with its external stair towers and striking corner tower constructed between 1909 and 1914. The factory produced until the 1994s and has been vacant since then.
The space could be converted into apartments and office space with communal gardens, while the railroad line running past could be turned into a park with a cycle highway. Living, working and relaxing in green surroundings – in the middle of Leipzig.
