Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord

The steelworks in the north of Duisburg was founded in 1902 by August Thyssen as a joint stock company for metallurgical operations. Five blast furnaces came into operation by 1908. In addition to the iron and steel works, the 200-hectare site also included a pit, a sintering plant, a coking plant and a foundry.

The Kraftzentrale (power plant), built in 1902 and extended in several stages up to 1911, was the heart of the ironworks. Until 1965, the machines were used to generate power and wind for the blast furnaces but eventually were shut down and scrapped. In 1997, the plant was converted into a multi-function venue for cultural events.

The Gießhalle (casting bay), at 84 metres long and 21 metres wide, is partly open to the air and forms part of the blast furnace arena 1. Apart from the furnace with its scaffold and casing, the arena comprises a set of counter-flow heat exchangers with scaffolding for hot and cold blast sliding valves to one side of the casting bay, dust repositories, sloping conveyer belts rising from the ore storage bunkers alongside a winch house and culm coke tower. When the smelting works were still in use, the iron in the casting bay would be ‘run-off’ approximately every two hours. The liquid iron ore flowed directly from the blast furnace into a bed of moulding sand, for solidification into pig iron (iron ingot). This was then cooled with water, broken up and transported to the casting bay or steel works for further processing.The latticed plate walls of the bay enabled a through draft to keep the space aired and the temperature under control.

Since the mid-1990s, this open-air building has been used for concerts, theatre and outdoor cinema. To enable the space to be used, the discharge aperture of the blast furnace was made safe, the iron ore ducts and funnels were blocked up, new sets of stairs were installed and a huge steel and concrete rostrum seating 1000 spectators was built into the space. To upgrade the performance space further, in 2003 a retractable wave-shaped roofing structure (designed by planinghaus architekten and the Büro für Industriearchäologie, Darmstadt), was built to afford visitors protection even from rain. The surface of the root consists in transparent, air-filled cushions, suspended from tracks that form part of a steel structure. The track supports vault out from the Gießhalle into the open air, up over the surrounding pipework to right above the ‘open-air foyer’.