Dr. Werner Nohl · landscape architect · honorary professor (Technical University of Munich)

SkiTube Center and Landscape Aesthetic Experience in Hasselfeld/Harz

 

Report to the administration of the Wernigerode District

 

Werner Nohl

 

More and more big technical infrastructures are erected in our landscapes. They are not only caused by traffic and supply, also tourism contributes a lot to this development. This is questionable in a double sense. Firstly, tourism mainly spreads out in aesthetically very attractive landscape areas, which are therefore endangered to lose that ressource, i.e. the beauty of landscape, although it is the basis of tourism as economical factor. Secondly, it’s the big technical infrastructures that by destroying the natural character of landscape cheat people out of what they are mainly looking for in the landscape: nature experience.

 

There are no easy solutions to these problems. Using the example of a SkiTube center which the community of Hasselfelde originally wanted to erect in its municipal district the following report is chosen to demonstrate what kind of problems may occur with regard to landscape aesthetics and how planning agencies might handle them.

 

The core building complex of the center which was supposed to be erected near to an existing “Western City” and a planned golf course includes a 400 m long and 13 m to 24 m high ski hall as well as a 35 m high hotel, a two-storey estate building, quite a few holiday homes, and a huge parking lot. It was designed to be located at a well visible southeast slope on a wide open rural plateau within the Harz Mountains.

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