Art + Design

Last update: 13 July, 2011.

An asphalt ramp at the end of a well-appointed suburban road leads down to a concrete terrace that opens onto the vast and uncertain space left behind by a mine. Into that space juts a strange steel structure, half suspension bridge, half board walk. It once was the front end of a large spreading machine and is now a pier waiting for its lake. We are at the headquarters of the IBA Fürst-Pückler-Land, the International Building Exhibition that has, for the last decade, been the brain trust and clearing house for innovative post-mining landscape design and architecture in the Lausitz.

The white-on-blue See with its German-English double entendre (lake, view) is the IBA's logo. The German entendre refers to what is becoming of the abandoned mining pits, the English entendre alludes to a hightened visual awareness that both informs, and is informed by, the transformation of the landscape. Design is central to the transformation. It creates focal points, vistas, contrast, shelter, precedents, and, not least, the tourist destinations sorely needed to reinvigorate the economy. The IBA headquarters sets the example. Perched high on the anticipated shore of Lake Ilse (webcam), it forms a handsome modern ensemble that houses offices, an elegant café, two exhibition spaces, an auditorium, and a bookstore replete with informational brochures and publications on industrial and cultural history, landscape and architecture. It is the ideal starting point for excursions into the active mining and post-mining landscape.

Lake Ilse is being filled with cleaned mining waste water and scheduled to reach its final level in 2015. How soon thereafter it will open for recreational activities remains to be seen. For one thing, there are concerns about the acidity of the water, which may require expensive chemical or biological treatment. For another, the loosely poured ground may be more treacherous than previously thought, as demonstrated by a dramatic recent landslide. In the interim, the adjacent town of Großräschen advertises lakeside plots for home construction.

The projects sponsored by IBA are an eclectic bunch, including floating houses, an observation tower, a power plant turned event location, a Slavic fort, a nature preserve, various parks, a marina, land art, a bicycling route, a garden city, a housing development, industrial heritage sites, an artists' barn: 30 projects in all, too many to cover here.

One of my favorites is the gorgeous Landmarke (land marker) on lake Sedlitz, dubbed rusty nail by the locals, a steel tower designed by Stefan Giers and Susanne Gabriel. The tower consists of plates of corten steel welded together into a monolithic sculpture whose rusty surface recalls the area's industrial heritage. The staircase profile is reminiscent, to my eye, of the terracing in a coal mine. I don't know whether this is intentional; if it is, then there is no flat-footed didacticism about it. Climbing the stairs is an acoustic adventure as the plates vibrate and reverberate differently with each step.

Its long list of projects notwithstanding, IBA, with a yearly budget of about 1.4 million Euro ($2 million), is the financial featherweight in the reclamation business. The two heavyweights are the LMBV (Lausitzer und Mitteldeutsche Bergbau-Verwaltungsgesellschaft), a publically funded organization that took over the cleanup responsibilities of the disbanded East German state and has disbursed several billion Euros so far; and Vattenfall, the privately owned operator of all mines and power plants. The large and expensive infrastructure projects - lakes, canals, locks, roads, soil stabilisation - are the work of the LMBV. Without the LMBV, the region would be a dysfunctional wasteland. It lays the groundwork for IBA's activities.

Vattenfall's role is more complicated. The company carry out reclamation work as mandated by the law (e.g. recultivation and water cleanup), but beyond that they are also heavily involved as corporate sponsor in pretty much every reclamation and cultural project in the region. They too are indispensable for IBA's work. Their own approach to design tends to be, shall we say, a little more corporate than IBA's, as seen in the concrete observation tower at the Cottbus-Nord mine and the botanical garden at Nochten.

Panorama Nochten (large file: 3.4 MB)

View from IBA terraces, early morning Once the business end of a spreader, now an aspiring pier. The pier's provenance View on nascent lake Ilse IBA terraces I IBA terraces II IBA terraces III Future beach front at IBA terraces IBA terraces IV IBA terraces - Exhibition Lake country: model and reality I Lake country: model and reality II New lakeside subdivision Landscape park, Großräschen Chain of lakes under construction Motorized water sports encouraged here Canal connecting future lakes Canal with iron deposits Floating home, Geierswald lake Floating home, Partwitz lake Diving school, Gräbendorf lake Diving school II Landmarke Sedlitzer See I Landmarke Sedlitzer See II Landmarke Sedlitzer See III Landmarke Sedlitzer See IV Observation tower Cottbus-Nord, courtesy of Vattenfall Observation tower Cottbus-Nord II Cottbus-Nord mine Nochten botanical garden with Boxberg power plant Nochten botanical garden II Nochten botanical garden III Desert motif, Nochten Boulder provenance map, Nochten Land art I, Pritzen Land art II, Pritzen Land art III, Pritzen Phoenix, Welzow-Süd. Ines Diederich, Michael Kruscha

Ilse was one of the many daughters and wives memorialized by the industrialists of the 19th century as namesakes for their sundry ventures. Mines and factories routinely carried names like Erika, Wilhelmine, Clara, Viktoria, Jenny, Renate, Eva, or Anna-Mathilde. (The shaft mine Dora gained the most notoriety among the lot as a Nazi missile factory and slave labor concentration camp.) Later, under the auspices of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the old patriarchal naming rite was deemed unsuitable for a manly socialist undertaking. The open cast mine Ilse-Ost (Ilse-East) thus became Tatkraft (vigor). There may have been some wishful thinking behind the new name since the exhaustion of the mine was already on the horizon. In the late 1950s, the authorities opened the Meuro mine nearby. Its flooding did not begin until well after the demise of the GDR, together with its naming rites, and so it is that Lake Ilse is now allowed to fill the remaining hole of Meuro.