Antoniter Quartier

Antoniter Community Centre, Cologne, Germany
2015

The church-run community center is surrounded by four radically different urban conditions: to the north it faces the gothic Antoniter-church that buffers it from the city´s most popular shopping street. From the west it is being overlooked by Renzo Piano´s fully glazed large-scale signature shopping icon. Along its eastern flank it becomes part of an urban block largely housing high-street retail, a program that the church was keen on incorporating into the project. The southern side is characterized by traffic infrastructures such as a parking garage and the entry to the inner-city freeway tunnel. The proposed fan-like terraced building absorbs this surrounding jumble into a single urban gesture. It thereby establishes a plaza for the church, steps away from the overpowering glazed free-form and opens up the view to the iconic church building at the entance to the freeway tunnel. As a result the community center is organized vertically connecting the ground-level church plaza with the raised city terrace as well as a more intimate roof garden surrounded by the existing block.