Hollerallee 27

HM of Archi-Hack: Gas Station

+ HONOURABLE MENTION

Archi-Hack: Gas Station

[17649]

Hollerallee 27: Repurposing Redundancy or One Person’s Trash Is Another Person’s Treasure

Team

Name: Lion Tautz

Nationality: German

Hollerallee 27 is a community center which uses the urgency of the climate crisis to reestablish collective politics of communal life as constitutive of the urban. 

The existing gas station is retained in totality, the extension grows around it. An urban palimpsest emerges: the kiosk becomes an open kitchen, the car wash a communal workshop, and the canopy provides shelter for the greengrocer below as well as space for the café above. Co-housing merges into co-working, and co-living extends into the neighbourhood. 

Everything is constructed from waste found within 10 minutes of the site: repurposed windows, transplanted floors, cigarette-butt insulation and load-bearing waste-paper brick walls. The material palette and caring aspiration dictate the project’s language and scale. A terraced roof garden provides low-tech remediation for the site’s contaminated soil: hemp extracts heavy metals through its roots, rainwater flushes contaminants down the steps over time.  Gas stations, testament to the erstwhile aspiration of even fuel coverage, enable tight-knit interventions into the urban fabric. As they become obsolete, the above transformation can scale up to entire countries’ fuel infrastructures. The car promised to shrink the world by bringing the distant near — Hollerallee 27 promises to grow the world by nurturing the nearby.

Jury Comments

– Hollerallee 27 thoughtfully engages with the notion of closeness embodied by the car and its infrastructural remnants, critically reinterpreting this paradigm through the lens of material reuse. By transforming these ruins into a new spatial proposition, the project challenges conventional ideas of proximity with a compelling alternative. The meticulous attention to detail and the exceptional quality of the drawing, combined with the proposal’s conceptual clarity and rigor, make it a standout entry in the competition. | Pablo Castillo Luna