BALCONY-TUNING
This project was carried out during the "Hotel-Neustadt" festival in Halle, Germany, in Summer 2003.
"Hotel- Neustadt" was a temporary hotel in an otherwise empty »Plattenbauten« (building made of prefabricated concrete panels built in the former GDR at low cost) in Halle Neustadt.
With the assistence of: Johanna Moser, Cornelia Schluricke, Reinder Bakker, R.Oskar Wittich und Mike Ronz

»...we don`t found our cities for generations anymore. Nevertheless, I had hoped to build a city, which does not only provide mere housing for more than it`s two or three generations,- a city which is more than just built room to place their tables or their beds. And just think, I saw myself as pensioner walking through my city and drinking mokka on this balcony on sundays....« Brigitte Reimann, quoted from Franziska Linkerhand

The New-Town of Halle-Neustadt is worn out, because it's original idea does not work anymore. Instead of the »economy of the collective« of the former socialist urban housing, it is the individual of today which needs to make use of the city. The balconies of the »Plattenbauten« are the interface between the private and the public space and are our starting-point for the semantic reloading of Halle-Neustadt.

pictures above: set up of the first balcony-tuning in front of the tuning shop

pictures below:
Balcony-Tuning was not restricted to the hotel but extended to cover the whole of Halle-Neustadt. As in the case of furniture-tuning, most of our work involved the provision of advice. We carried out over 100 balcony advices with residents of the locality, dealing with light concepts, cats, swimming pools and folding tables, box seats and sun blinds, forbidden nails in renovated houses that interfered with the heat insulation, and terraces on the ground floor. The advice-giving process, in some cases, ended in a financial schedule, a detailed plan and a parts list for the building market. In other cases, a chat was sufficient to clarify problems.

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