City Centre Stuttgart-Vaihingen: SchwabenGalerie
For a long time, the historic city centre of Stuttgart-Vaihingen had not been formed by church, townhall and school, but by the huge brewery complex the main employer in the city and a monster structure.
The place elsewhere reserved for public spaces had been occupied here by the walled-in brewery. The new city centre project, named Schwabengalerie gave Vaihingen a true urban focus with public squares and buildings for the first time.
The competition brief for the Suabian Gallery included an American-type shopping mall. The new design develops the spaces of a European city with the old townhall and new townhall square now forming the centre and three pedestrian precincts ending in another square, 7m higher. The new Civic Forum and the market hall are between both squares. Other structures are arranged as three urban building blocks with shops, offices and a hotel, each one as an own typological form.
The centre piece of the ensemble is the so-called Atrium, a glass hall with a double function: one as the winterly counterpart to the open square, both forming a unity, and second as the skylight for, and path to and from, the underground car park.