Coal Washing & Landscape Park Zollverein
Conversion of a UNESCO World Heritage Site to the Ruhr Museum with a landscape park
Place: Essen
Category: Arts & Culture, Squares & Outdoor Lighting
Coal Washing & Landscape Park Zollverein - Lighting Design for the Conversion of a UNESCO World Heritage Site to the Ruhr Museum with a landscape park
Nicole Kober: "There are projects that are particularly close to your heart as a 'child of the Ruhr area'. This also applies to the Zollverein area with the coal washery and the landscape park, which I worked on during my time at LKL AG and then as a freelancer for several years. "
The museum building, the former coal washery, is 60 meters long, 30 meters wide and 40 meters high and is the largest building in the Zollverein colliery. In operation, it was a large machine that served to sort, classify, temporarily store and distribute the hard coal. The structural design is completely subordinate to these functions. The conversion of the building by the architects Rem Koolhaas and Heinrich Böll takes monument protection into account. You have accessed the building from top to bottom, analogous to the original production flow. The public is first transported to the 24m level with an escalator and enters the coal washery in the international visitor center Zollverein, where they are received with all service functions such as information and ticket counters, cloakroom, café and shop. The intensive orange of the lighting concept for the escalator stands as a metaphor for glowing coal or liquid, hot steel. The meandering access staircase inside the building takes up the same analogy as a light sculpture. In the actual exhibition areas, the original machine architecture is illuminated in a cool, diffuse manner and the actual exhibits are brilliantly warm-toned. The entire lighting system was installed on raw cable routes based on the industrial character - also to ensure maximum flexibility. In the penthouse-like event room on the roof of the coal washery, a lighting concept with highly shielded downlights was chosen in order to avoid light reflections on the panoramic panes and thus give the astonished guests the maximum view of the Ruhr area at night.
After the closure of the Zollverein colliery and coking plant, a wild nature that is second to none has emerged on the open spaces of the industrial wasteland. Botanical rarities and animals can now be discovered where waste rock used to be stored as a waste product from coal mining: the Zollverein Landscape Park.
Note: The lighting design for the Kohlenwäsche was initially carried out by Nicole Kober as an employee for LichtKunstLicht (LKL) AG until 08/2006 and the subsequent planning and construction management services for the landscape park as KOBER LICHTPLANER for LKL AG. LKL AG and the project team were awarded the "Award of Merit" as part of the International Illumination Design Award of the IESNA. In 2023, the conversion to LED technology in the Kohlenwäsche for the Ruhr Museum was carried out by planning by the KOBER LICHTPLANER team. In the course of this, the energy consumption of the lighting could be reduced by 80% and the high museum requirements for lighting compared to the original lighting were even exceeded.
Contractor light: LKL AG (initially); KOBER LICHTPLANER (execution & re-lighting)
Photos Copyright: ERCO I www.erco.com
Photographer Thomas Mayer I www. thomasmayerarchive.de
Architecture: OMA I http://oma.eu
Architecture: Böll Architekten I http://architekt-boell.de