Make way! How do you create beautiful, lively places?

About the tour ‘On your marks…’

How often has the city centre been declared dead, and yet it lives on, especially in its squares. They are the city’s shop windows and living rooms. They give it a face and create an urban identity, so that the people who come to the square can, in the best case scenario, say: ‘This is our home, this is our city’ – a stage of life that invites you to see and be seen, to stroll and shop.

With the triumph of online communication, public urban space has not become meaningless; on the contrary, it has taken on new tasks. Young people in particular, who are at home in digital media, seek analogue togetherness in atmospheric spaces, on streets and squares that are not interchangeable, that appear authentic, that possibly tell something of the city’s history. So why do architects and urban developers find it so difficult to create suitable spaces?

Why, for example, is Wiesbaden’s Luisenplatz not a place where people like to meet up? It has so much going for it: it is beautiful, modest and well-proportioned; with the obelisk and St. Boniface’s Church, it has a distinctive profile; it is also centrally located, easily accessible and spatially cohesive. Gottfried Kiesow rightly called it ‘the most impressive creation of classicism in Wiesbaden, surpassed in Germany only by Königsplatz in Munich’. But it lacks the ‘strong edges’: the shops and restaurants that bring a square to life.

Like Mauritiusplatz, the heart of old Wiesbaden, the centre of the historic city. For decades the problem child among Wiesbaden’s squares, Mauritiusplatz nevertheless has an indestructible vitality. There is a constant coming and going here, not least because you can still feel something of the small-scale narrowness of the old city. In addition to Kirchgasse, Wiesbaden’s main shopping street, four other streets lead to the square, which, surrounded by Karstadt, smaller shops and cafés, functions like a Speaker’s Corner that no one can escape.

This also applies in a different way to Schlossplatz: the town hall, state parliament and market church demonstrate that a square does not have to be stylistically uniform in order to be accepted by the public. Despite their differences, the buildings form a lively urban ensemble; the spaces they enclose create a vibrant sequence of squares that are pleasant to walk through, from the Dern’schen Gelände to ‘den Quellen’, where Burgstraße marks the beginning of the modern, square-hostile Wiesbaden of the 1950s and 1960s.

The neighbouring Kaiser-Friedrich-Platz (formerly Theaterplatz, see cover photo) is a typical victim of post-war planning with its ideal of the ‘relaxed city’: to the west, the square lacks a clear enclosure of façades, and to the south, the ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’ apartment building gives it the cold shoulder. But you only have to look at the Bowling Green opposite to see how it should be done: the Kurhaus and colonnades surround the square like a forum and, with the fountain in the middle, form a perfect city icon.

With Christopher Schwarz, jury member of the German Architecture Prize.

Or come along to our other architecture tour instead: about the architecture of arriving and entering?