RUNNER UP

OF CYCLES AND STREAMS

Team Description: A productive city is a city of flows. Flows of resources, materials, goods, people, labor, knowledge, water, energy, wind (...) communicate and influence each other. MÜHLGANG HUB acts as a connecting point amongst Graz’ productive flows, enhancing the mill stream’s potentials as a productive vein. The new center becomes a space, where ideas, materials, foods and energy are created, disassembled, repaired, recycled, processed, stored, sold, communicated and fed into cycles. The existing hall is transformed into a public inner courtyard. It is a meeting point, market place, workshop, storage, passage, delivery zone and gallery. While the daily business is bustling, various production cycles are running in the flat base structure and micro-businesses are working in the towers above. MÜHLGANG HUB becomes a dynamic center in a city of flows.

Jury Statement: “The jury highly appreciates the internal square and the intelligent adaption of the existing building, thereby creating a new typology of space in the productive landscape. The semi-covered plaza allows to combine productive uses with public activities and in that, offers a spatial potential hardly found in the city: an open, non-descriptive, in-between space, able to evolve and suitable for the area. […] The strength of the project is clearly its typology and therefore valued highly by the jury. ”

Team Statement: “We were immediately intrigued by the site, its complexity and potential, as it is crucial to the city’s urban development, as well as its production cycles. While it thus demands a sensitive approach to current challenges, an understanding and careful dealing with the specific existing built fabric, the actual users and the neighborhood were equally important to us. Flowing beyond the strategic site and throughout the city, the millstream offers hidden qualities, which we wanted to address and weave into the city’s cycles."