After the Second World War there had been six flak towers left here. Two of them are in a beautiful baroque garden in the second district. For a long time they had been untouched but they are not holy mountains, quite the contrary. You should be allowed to use them, stop making them a taboo.
We think it is time to find a new way of living with them instead of praising them by letting them be what they are. We intend in one case to adapt a spiral cherry walkway from the bottom to the top. This project would be interesting in many ways. How could someone work with this type of building and how would you install contemporary garden architecture in historical places. This garden would be a vertical one and would not disturb the ornamental baroque site around. It’d be one way of conquering the flak tower.
For a long time they had been untouched because no solution seemed to be right. Now we think it is time to find a new way of living with them instead of denying the problem. We intend to build a spiral cherry walkway from the bottom to the top to one of them. So people could walk up get a wide view over the city. The spiral cherry tree promenade would quote the baroque aspect of the garden in a delicate way.
„Just like ivy on a tree, the spiral climbs up the tower, which is the transformed from a symbolic sign of the violent historical past to an integrative component of a park. This metamorphosis however is merely an apparent one, only skin deep. The floral raiment, literally playing the role of the grass that grows over something until it’s forgotten, serves here instead to call into question this tendency to try to play down the past in order to forget. The very conspicuousness with which it broadcasts its intention and its banal repetitive gesture points out the irony in this endeavor, just as in the martial presence of the monument itself.“ (Quote: Angelo Stangno, architect and writer, out of FADENBRAND Folio Verlag OK books 4/04)