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Johannstadt Prefabricated Concrete Slab Factory, Dresden
Concept for an open-air concrete slab micromuseum® landscape
The Erich Kästner Museum in Dresden, opened in 1999, was the first micromuseum® concept implemented by robarchitects. Since it was opened in February 2000, more than twenty thousand visitors have experienced the tailor-made, growing modular museum and enthusiastically sought their own individual way of entering the complex world of Kästner.
The museum project on the site of the former prefabricated concrete slab factory in Dresden's Johannstadt district is a work of urban landscape art which is also based on a microarchitectural concept. Here also, development processes are concerned, as are analysis, deconstruction and visualisation by combining architectural elements in a new way, as well as viewing the world in miniature to help understand the real world and the relativity of size; in order to implement the methodology of making wholes from parts / hinting at the macro world in a pointed selection of fragments and combining past and present via living preservation of historical monuments in a resource-saving architectural dramaturgy.
On a 70 hectare site in the middle of the Johannstadt residential area, the Johannstadt Prefabricated Concrete Slab Factory produced concrete slabs for socialist housing construction projects from 1958 until it was shut down in 1990. The factory in Dresden was particularly important, as it was one of the first prefabricated slab factories in the GDR. The ruins of the city destroyed by bombing were not transported away, they were recycled for reconstruction. The bricks were ground to chippings, mixed with cement and subsequently pressed to form stone blocks and slabs.
In the opinion of robarchitects and the IG Platte society, the initiators for the preservation of the former concrete slab factory, prefabricated concrete housing is just as much a part of Dresden's identity as the Frauenkirche or the Semper Opera House. With their concept for Germany's first concrete slab construction museum, the partners managed to negotiate with the city and were granted a strip of land 15 meters wide and 100 meters long at the edge of the former factory grounds. The remainder of the grounds, having been unused for 11 years, was cleared for demolition under pressure from an initiative of neighbouring residents, while the museum makers saved what could be saved: The old, now renovated porters house, an original lamp from the factory, the old gravel silo and approximately 50 tonnes of building materials - brick chippings, steel frames, welded wire mesh, coloured tiles, external wall slabs and shaped concrete blocks.
The material has been temporarily stored in chronologically-ordered boxes for viewing on the site, which has now been cleaned up, pending subsequent clarification of legal and financial questions. In the long term, robarchitects intends to create a collage-type landscape carpet embedded in the earth - the concrete time line - as a living on-site monument for art, recycling and history. In this minimalist way, a piece of German history, particularly the history of concrete slab construction, will be brought to life as a visible walk-through experience. Sandstone fragments remind us of the Carola Hospital, which was converted to a school for the SA during the Hitler regime before it was destroyed on February 13th 1945. The original porter's house of the former concrete slab factory represents the historical change and the beginning of GDR history, as it illustrates the proof of the technological development and the search for accommodation models as an expression of a collective identity.
The recycled concrete slab construction history in pill form is not only in an explicit dialogue with the prefabricated concrete slab buildings (macro) in the immediate vicinity, it also refers to varied forward-looking looking questions, e.g. how much space does a person need, how will city life be and what role could modular construction play in this.
The question as to the value of things is also dealt with by the museum. What is usually dismissed as rubbish represents the entirely un-nostalgic attempt to create something completely new from destruction, while transporting important historical aspects into the present.
robarchitects
Dresden, 30/6/2002
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