The Invention of the Old City: A Didactic Experiment: Three Projects for Lübeck

The rebirth of the urban image of German cities built up over the centuries—cancelled by the war, later demolitions and modern reconstructions—raises crucial issues in the discussion about strategies to adopt in historical contexts. The small-sized structure of the urban plots, which was often replaced by larger buildings, is the common element present in some German city centers. Different strategies adopt two different kind of interventions: “pilot buildings”, which reconstruct the original buildings as copies; new buildings which reinterpret the original houses in a contemporary way. According to the principles of critical reconstruction, introduced in the European debate starting from the 1970s, the recent transformations of some urban blocks inside the medieval Gründungsviertel (Founders District) in Lübeck has become a positive example for a didactic experiment in the master’s degree at the Politecnico di Milano (2020–2021, with Prof. Annegret Burg). After an in-depth analysis of the historical morphological structure of the urban form of one of the oldest Hanseatic cities of northern Germany, the research work led to design proposals for the blocks around the Marktplatz and the so-called Buddenbrookhaus, aimed at replacing out-of-scale or poor-quality buildings from the post-war reconstruction period with new morphological structures, based on the original form, still legible today thanks to historical maps.