KUBAA Culture Station Aalen

Major mu­nic­i­pal de­vel­op­ment pro­jects cur­rently ongoing in the Baden-Würt­tem­berg uni­ver­sity town of Aalen include one dubbed “Urban Oval”. A mixed-use dis­trict con­tain­ing over 200 flats along with retail and cul­tural fa­cil­i­ties is being fash­ioned here on a former in­dus­trial site of oval shape bounded by railway tracks to the north of the central station and a curving stretch of the town’s main ar­te­r­ial road that con­verges with the railway line further south. The Culture Station in­au­gu­rated in 2020 rates as a high-fo­cus light­house project for the re­ju­ve­nated site.

The success of the KUBAA project is clearly due to the highly im­pres­sive blue­print pro­duced by the a+r ar­chi­tects’ prac­tice and their imag­i­na­tive han­dling of a ram­shackle legacy struc­ture. This prime example of how to co­gently re­de­fine a build­ing was, however, also fa­cil­i­tated by a dev­as­tat­ing fire that broke out in 2014, dam­ag­ing much of a former railway repair works that had already un­der­gone several mis­con­ceived ex­ten­sion and con­ver­sion jobs. The build­ing’s inner fabric, its roof and the bulk of its outer walls were ir­re­triev­ably lost to the fire.

The ar­chi­tects were faced with the chal­lenge of nev­er­the­less pre­serv­ing the in­dus­trial ar­chi­tec­ture’s essence whilst mould­ing its frag­ments into a new overall entity that can now rightly be re­garded as a for­ward-look­ing cul­tural centre for the new century. Its strik­ing sand­stone façades were re­stored and re­paired wher­ever pos­si­ble. Sec­tions that had been de­stroyed were re­placed by colour-stained exposed con­crete. The smoother surface of the new sand­stone el­e­ments clearly doc­u­ments the in­ter­ven­tions made.

While the side gables were reroofed in the orig­i­nal manner, the lengthy struc­ture whence they issue is now the project’s true eye­catcher: its gable roof has made way for a long drawn-out top floor en­veloped by a seem­ingly light­weight cov­er­ing of pleated per­fo­rated plate trans­par­ent enough to afford a view of the ash­lar-like struc­ture inside. “A curtain made of cloth or the like springs to mind, as does a con­tem­po­rary style of in­dus­trial ar­chi­tec­ture,” is how project leader Hellmut Schiefer de­scribes the idea behind the blue­print.

The uses to which the build­ing is put have been in­te­grated adopt­ing the “house-within-a-house” prin­ci­ple. Box-like com­part­ments with both load-bear­ing and bracing prop­er­ties have been in­stalled on the ground floor as a means of struc­tur­ing the gutted space behind the period façades. The new-build block above houses rooms given over to cul­tural train­ing and pro­duc­tion ac­tiv­i­ties. KUBAA injects added life into the new site with fa­cil­i­ties such as a music school, a cinema, a theatre and a top-notch events venue that cater to the in­ter­ests of all ech­e­lons of Aalen society. At the same time, it has also become an at­trac­tive focal point for the region as a whole, not least on account of its mul­ti­ple award-win­ning ar­chi­tec­ture.

The ar­chi­tects again found the handles they wanted for this far-from-com­mon­place project in the range man­u­fac­tured by FSB. “FSB prod­ucts are time­less and the very essence of good quality,” they say. They sought fit­tings that would blend in har­mo­niously with the ar­chi­tec­ture as a whole – and would con­sti­tute a fully-fledged part thereof. The FSB 1015 door fur­ni­ture fitted boasts a classic design that speaks for itself and sports a matt Stain­less Steel finish in the present project.