![]() Until 2001, year in which the UNESCO declared that Shaft XII and its environment should be considered a World Heritage Site, being an important example of a European primary industry of great economic significance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Shortly after the closing of the mine and coking plant in late 1986, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW, bought it from the then-owner and one of the largest mining companies in Germany, the Ruhrkohle AG, RAG, and declared Shaft XII as a monument, assuring the preservation and mantainance of the place, but without a clear plan of what to do with all that land contaminated by the former mining actions. In the late 19th century the mine was expanded, reaching ten extraction shafts, which until its closure would become twelve, the last one of them being best known for its buildings of the Modern Movement, designed by architects Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer. Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.The Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex was opened in 1847 and for 40 years, along with coke plant next to it, was among the largest industrial complex in Europe. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario. In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. ![]() Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below. These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized’ almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network. To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to ‘inhabit’ it. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. However beautiful, Albert’s campus is windy, cold and empty. ![]() The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert’s project. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building. “In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. ![]() Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Jussieu / Two Libraries, Paris, France, 1992
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