Postplatz Reconstruction, Dresden

Description

Designed by Massimo and Gabriella Carmassi, with Mara Pinardi, the project for Postplatz in Dresden was conceived as a 1991 invited competition proposal for the reconstruction of one of the most compromised urban voids left by war and post-war rebuilding. The area is described in the relation as a chaotic and shapeless widening crossed by a dense network of roads and tram tracks, bordered by post-war buildings of very modest quality and by semi-abandoned lands left over from the bombings. Only the Zwinger, the theatre and the ruins of the royal palace still evoke the former splendour of Dresden. The proposal addresses this condition not through an isolated architectural object but through the re-foundation of public space. Its declared aim is to recover part of the quality of the ancient city by drawing on its memory and by generating a large historical and architectural void dedicated to culture and nature, capable of making the recent surrounding constructions recede into the background. The guiding principle of the intervention is the progressive rediscovery, through archaeological excavation, of the eighteenth-century fortifications, assumed as the main spatial and functional reference for the new design. A second decisive gesture is the continuation of the existing canal along the Zwinger, set parallel to the line of the fortifications. Together with this water trace, the project introduces a tree-lined park conceived as a belvedere and crossed by a long pedestrian and cycle path. In this way the proposal transforms Postplatz from a traffic-dominated gap into a civic landscape where archaeological memory, public space, water and greenery are woven into a new urban order. The project does not propose a literal reconstruction of the lost city, but a critical urban re-composition rooted in the historical structure of the place.