Square, Esch-sur-Alzette

Who would have thought that a young team of Austrian architects could be so seriously romantic? But a background of industrial ruins is not a place for having fun, not like the Architecture Biennale in Venice where AllesWirdGut ('all will be well') invited visitors to zoom through the Austrian pavilion on go-carts.

Belval West, which covers an area of 120 hectares west of Esch-sur-Alzette is not the only large urban development site in Luxemburg, where offices and residential units are sprouting from the ground like mushrooms. It is, however, the only one on a brownfield site. Of the steelworks in operation here since 1909, only two blast furnaces and a handful of steel mill and administration buildings are left today. On the edge of this group of industrial monuments will be a public square designed by AllesWirdGut. The elongated square provides access to the new district from the railway station and forms a sharp divide between the shiny chrome office buildings and the rusty dinosaurs of the Industrial Age. Construction will begin in 2006, but the Stahlhof (the square's name translates as Steel Court) is not due to be completed until 2015.

AllesWirdGut accommodate this time lag by spreading a carpet of variously treated concrete tiles that will start out as a small trail and grow along with the square over the years. Lined up along its length are various facilities (catwalk, sun deck, wading pool for tired feet, planted garden), which will at first be laid out on the ground as is, with its sparse growth. These activity islands will eventually merge with the concrete carpet, although some uncovered areas will remain in order to preserve the present vegetation. As in their design for a square in Innichen/San Candido (Italy), AllesWirdGut have proposed lights that are built into site-specific furniture in order to minimize the number of designed elements. In this case, concrete blocks combine a bench, bicycle stand and refuse bin with luminaires that light the surroundings horizontally. In addition, light-emitting cubes are attached to the piers still supporting one of the two viaducts.