Nieto Sobejano

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos win competition to design a Congress Centre and Hotel in the area of the Imperial Palace of Goslar (Germany)

02.09.2019

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos (Madrid/Berlin) in collaboration with Topotek1 has been awarded first Prize by the competition jury for the construction of a congress centre and hotel in Goslar (state of Lower Saxony). The project is located in an area of the historic center in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace originally built in the 11th century and was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1992. The mixed program required for a congress hall of 500 spectators and a hotel of 120 rooms had to adapt to the topographic and historical conditions of the place proposing a new landscape treatment of the environment.
The design presented by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, establishes a dialogue with the three main historical elements of the place: the Imperial Palace (Kaiserpfalz), the footprint of the cloister from the former cathedral, and the remains of the foundations of the medieval wall. The decision to divide the ensemble into three different volumes minimizes the impact of the intervention in the context and respects the memory of the original layout of the wall. Three quadrate courtyards - an echo of the plan of the historic cloister - articulate the interior spaces of both buildings. The horizontality of the project is accentuated by means of a wide platform conceived as a landscaped terrace that interacts with the surroundings and unifies the different interventions. The public scale of the congress center and the intimate privacy of the hotel are expressed through the treatment of the windows and the exterior slate cladding on the facades, evoking the historical and traditional material construction of the city of Goslar.