Lechner & Lechner

Architects

SALZACH DEVELOPMENT

jyear: 2018 | typologie: public | status: concept

With the arrival of summer and the revitalization of the natural areas of the city by residents and tourists, the nature of the shore comes into focus again. "Connecting the Salzach river basin with the surrounding urban context is one of the greatest urban planning tasks that Salzburg still has to fulfil," is one of our central observations. In addition to loungers, bathing and barbecue facilities by the water, methods and strategies were developed for how the river area can be transformed into a local recreation area in the long term. The people of Salzburg have a long history of dealing with their river. In the course of the river regulation in the 19th century, committed citizens of the city, with the strong participation of Josef Mayburger, founded the "City Beautification Committee" to preserve the old town of Salzburg and to preserve the poetry that has always formed this city into an architectural and urban jewel , organizationally and logistically in the long term. The non-straightening and preservation of the curve as an atmospheric, sensual feature of the Salzach in the city area is a great success achieved through this commitment by the people of Salzburg, the importance of which cannot be overestimated.

It is only thanks to the efforts of the "City Beautification Committee", now known as the City Association, that the Salzach river basin is still an attractive open space, especially on the embankments, which is used intensively by the young people of Salzburg when the weather is nice. Nonetheless, the Salzach river basin harbors great potential for optimizing urban and landscape planning. Showing this and presenting the vision for a district-spanning local recreation area is our motivation for writing this work. The river Salzach flows through the urban area of the city of Salzburg

for about 4.6 kilometers in length, 1.5 kilometers of which lead through the historic old town center. An interaction between the water and the people in Salzburg does take place in some areas of the bank, but not nearly to the extent that it would be possible. "Within the complex relationships of the urban cosmos, the water surface - although physically present - is virtually non-existent." The narrowing of the river course increased the flow rate significantly, resulting in a bed load deficit with the result that the bed has risen by 7 to 8 meters to this day buried.

In order to develop this further with regard to the consequences, we would like to describe the situation at the Salzachgalerien, a market held regularly on the banks of the Salzach, as an example. As can be seen in the picture, not a single one of the many market visitors interacts with the water surface, nobody steps onto the embankment, although both are spatially very close. Lost situations like this, in which the water surface and the Salzach bank are only “there” without being claimed by people, can be found in many areas of the Salzach bank.

The theme of shaping the banks of the Salzach is by no means a new one. A number of project studies, discussions and a wide variety of initiatives to use the river area with various activities bear witness to the great need of the city dwellers for a river area with a high recreational and leisure value. The river area has high potential for further improvements. In our work, we address the need to reorganize motor vehicle traffic on the river in order to resolve conflicts of use while maintaining public transport between individual traffic and an attractive open space and to soften the trapezoidal riverbank profile. One possibility for this would be the politically controversial Kapuzinerberg tunnel, the effects of which on inner-city individual traffic were examined. The focus is also on specific offers for users of the banks of the Salzach, such as curved footbridges, oval platforms, differentiated grids of steps, lounger nets in which you can dangle above the water, bathing opportunities within the river, as well as barbecue facilities, restaurants

and kiosks near the water. A diverse play of materials, including sand, is designed to stimulate the senses. In particular, the need to be able to swim in the river area was met in an atmospherically very independent way compared to river pools in other cities. In contrast to the common approach of building river baths as jetties or floating platforms into the river and swimming directly in its water, these baths are firmly built into the riverbank and are fed from the clean water of the tributaries and the numerous confluences of the Almkanal. The idea is to channel the difference in level between the inflowing waters and the Salzach caused by the deepening of the river into a basin for flooded steps, where the water running over large stone slabs is naturally heated. In this pool you can swim in the river in the heated clean water. The water leaves the pool via an overflow edge into the river, triggering a constant cleaning process in the pool. Special attention was also paid to flood protection in all areas.

This is deliberately not modeled as a hard edge of the city, but as a soft, flowing transition that is gently modeled out of the terrain and formulated to follow the intention of connecting the city and the river area. A typology of flood protection is shown that largely manages without the erection of walls and whose presence is ideally not noticed by untrained observers. A different solution was only found for restaurants and kiosks by the water. Based on the “The BIG U” project in New York City, in which roofs that can be folded down in a section along the East River are added to an existing “overpass” in the event of a flood, our proposal for these neuralgic interventions also consists of roofs that can be folded down in the event of a flood can be folded down to protect the restaurants and kiosks on the water. A major topic is also the handling of the historic tree population, the preservation of which was taken into account in all planning steps and the implementation of which is always projected with careful means.