Urban forest

Riebeckplatz is simultaneously a hub of regional and supra-regional traffic movements and the connection between the main station and the urban precinct of the inner city. But the territorial transport infrastructure built in the sixties has split the place into fragments and diminished its urban qualities. The Halle project consists in a welcoming forest that blurs the distinction between infrastructure and public space, creating a new landscape where cars and pedestrians can coexist. Instead of splitting functions and designing a compact parking area, the parking layout has been extended to the entire site transforming the leftover space of the infrastructures into an active space. 
These spaces will have the potential to contain different kinds of events such as an open-air cinema, music concerts or different types of sports activities as well as bars and restaurants.
In a city where economic crisis and the decrease of its population makes structural densification not an option anymore, our proposal tries to achieve a visual and programmatic change by systematically planting trees, defining with minimum means an open system that develops through time.
The use of trees in the site introduces both sameness and difference. On the one hand, it establishes a general image and a “theme” for the whole area. But on the other it is able to generate a variety of spatial situations creating different conditions and relationships with the rest of the city and designed for all modes of transport.