From the outside in –
focusing on the core

Pop­u­la­tion decline leads to vacant build­ings in cities, which are often demol­ished. In Asch­er­sleben, as part of the IBA Urban Rede­vel­op­ment 2010 project, a strat­e­gy was devel­oped to delib­er­ate­ly shrink the city from the out­side in: periph­er­al areas are being rede­vel­oped while the his­toric cen­ter is being strengthened.

Along a ring road around the old town, artis­tic projects were cre­at­ed on demo­li­tion sites, includ­ing the world’s first ​“Dri­ve-Thru Gallery.” The firm chezweitz real­ized sev­er­al instal­la­tions there, includ­ing the ​“Hybrid Walls” with exhi­bi­tions and the ​“Wan­del­haus,” an instal­la­tion of col­ored ste­les that, as dri­vers pass by, assem­bles itself into a house interior.

The many sta­tions of the Dri­ve-Thru Gallery and oth­er urban rede­vel­op­ment projects were final­ly pre­sent­ed in the clos­ing exhi­bi­tion in 2010 in the premis­es of a new­ly ren­o­vat­ed card­board fac­to­ry. chezweitz pur­sued the sceno­graph­ic idea of​the­mat­i­cal­ly fill­ing the space from a per­spec­tive, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly allow­ing it to be expe­ri­enced as unfilled from anoth­er angle through the graph­ic ele­ment of the line. With these projects, the Hybrid­walls and the Wan­del­haus at the Dri­ve Thru Gallery, chezweitz was able to demon­strate that sceno­graph­ic-urban­is­tic inter­ven­tions have a sig­nif­i­cant and enrich­ing effect with­in tra­di­tion­al urban development.