Architectural Walk

For a decade and a half the city that confidently dubbed itself a boomtown after 1989 has seemed like a huge building site. New buildings and renovations were springing up everywhere: the three-storey shopping mall at the Hauptbahnhof, Zaha Hadid’s BMW factory, the newly-constructed Gallery of Contemporary Art. Residents of Leipzig had pretty much become accustomed to the staccato rhythm of the large-scale projects.

Even when it became clear ten years and more after the Reunification that Leipzig had ranked amongst the shrinking cities for some time, they created a thousand new projects based on this fact: empty factories became gallery areas, corner shops became graphic design offices, blemishes were deliberately made into images to be put on display. Leipzig competed against London for the 2012 Olympic Games. Admittedly the construction boom has eased off noticeably in recent years: extensions are dominant, with large-scale building sites becoming increasingly rare. This is a stroll through a city that is searching for its new equilibrium – and is now even growing again.

The ten stops