Students create redevelopment plans for Bonn's Rhine riverfront

Design and planning students at Texas A&M envisioned turning the downtown Rhine riverfront in Bonn, Germany into a destination for residential and business development and tourism during a fall 2011 [study abroad] (http://www.arch.tamu.edu/academics/study-abroad/) studio.

Their recommendations for the riverfront included central plaza designs, increased green space and pedestrian path connectivity, boardwalk and riverbank development, decreasing the amount of physical barriers and preserving and enhancing historical monuments.

The students, led by Chang-Shan Huang, associate professor of landscape architecture, also recommended changes to a riverfront area that includes two of Bonn’s major attractions, Beethovenhalle, a concert venue memorializing Bonn native Ludwig von Beethoven, and the city’s opera house.

“The distance between the two is minimal but with the area’s existing conditions they feel kilometers apart,” said the students who created the design.

They proposed an art history promenade to connect the venues, with freestanding silhouette sculptures of important artists and plaques with information about their lives and the influence they had on the city’s cultural development.

Students, advised by German landscape architects Johannes Bottger, Thomas Knuvener and David Baier, and teaching assistant Adam Nugent, a [Master of Landscape Architecture] (http://laup.arch.tamu.edu/academics/graduate/mla/) student, developed their proposals in three phases.

First, in a site inventory and analysis phase, students learned about Bonn as a cultural landscape.

“The goal of this phase was to teach students how to study a cultural landscape they’re unfamiliar with and help them better understand the physical, social, economic, demographic, historical, cultural and regulatory context of the project at the city and regional scale,” said Huang, holder of the Harold L. Adams ’61 Endowed Interdisciplinary Professorship in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning.

In the project’s next phase, students used what they learned in phase one to develop comprehensive design programs and schematic master plans for the entire project area, measuring approximately two miles long and a half-mile wide.

In the final phase, students created detailed site designs illustrating their vision for the site and accessed strategies for realizing the project.

Landscape architecture students demonstrated how goals, objectives and concepts established for the master plan can be implemented at a site-design level of detail.

The urban planning students took the information and choices of the first two phases, creating implementation strategies, including policy and development considerations that the proposed changes to the urban landscape would entail.

Students also developed an alternative master plan and detailed site plans for the riverfront during a fall 2010 semester [studio] (http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2011/4/25/huang-bonn-project/) .