ULLEVI
ULLEVI
Ullevi
The Walkable city - fabricated with triangles and circles
Filippa Arnås, Sam de Jong, Elin Emretsson & Ester Schreiber
The city should be open and accessible to all. This means that you should feel invited and free to walk and explore all of its spaces. For us, that means working with different ways of bridging the barriers preventing movement throughout the city.
The human relationship to water has guided our designs and inspired the change that is needed. In Gothenburg water is everywhere present, but nowhere accessible. It is commonly viewed as a problem, which causes overflow and destruction, not an asset that brings joy and flows with purpose. Our aim is to correct that.
The site is home to Gothenburg’s largest arena, Ullevi. One of the city’s most famous landmarks and almost a part of the landscape itself. It is a place defined by abrupt encounters. In many ways, these encounters are a definition of the urban situation and we have used them to inspire our work. We looked at some of the contradictions represented on the site; public and private, soft and hard, overfilled and empty as opportunities to apply oursystem. A system that is in itself represented by opposites, the hard stone that seeks to lead water and the soft sponge that seeks to gather it.
The Bifurcation
Filippa Arnås
The bifurcation is a way in which nature is allowed to take its place in the city and instead let the city's people adapt. The idea is to create a natural restoration in the city center, where all the water that collects within the Ullevi site will pass through. This possibility has been used by filtering and purifying the water inside the bifurcation, with several components that will consist of different materials. Thus, although the bifurcation is located in one of the most active areas of the city, the nature perspective is allowed to go first.
The Wetland
Sam de Jong
The wetland is a central part of the site Ullevi in many ways. It’s the buffer for both rainwater and flooding from the river. The rainwater from the hill, Ullevi and the X-duct will end up here. In addition to taking care of flooding on and around the site it will have a big role connecting the different parts of the site to each other making it a walkable part of the city. I imagine the space being a place to gather before and after events at Ullevi as well as being a space to eat lunch for the office workers or a place for kids to play by the water after school.
The X-duct
Elin Emretsson
I look upon the x- duct almost like a stitch, stitching together a wounded landscape disrupted by high-speed traffic. It connects two parts of the city previously disconnected and gives people access to a hillside forest and an amazing viewpoint looking down onto centralGothenburg and Ullevi. Every inch of the structure gathers water, and every surface slopes to lead the water to the center point, where it flows into a reservoir to be purified and stored. If needed, this stock could be used as freshwater in the local community. But more commonly the water is used to operate a children's learning facility, located in and around the reservoir. Here there are spaces for exhibitions and science labs where children can learn about environmental change and its impact on the local biological environment.The x-duct is a new landmark as well as an everyday part of the city's infrastructure.
The Arena
Ester Schreiber
The Arena of Ullevi defines its site in many both exciting and challenging ways. In this suggestion, the Arena becomes more of a public parc than a closed room. The flow of the terrain makes it accessible and adventurous, as it blends in seamlessly into the surrounding wetland and the rest of the landscape. It is a place to walk past, through and to stay in. It still holds the possibility to host a large amount of people, while the activities it inhabits can vary to a larger degree. Instead of being a barrier between neighborhoods, Ullevi thus becomes a passage and a place to be, in electric contact with water and its surroundings.
