Kubaa Cultural Centre Aalen
Large letters above the main entrance read Kubaa, the abbreviation for the Kulturbahnhof or Cultural Centre Aalen. Although the German name suggests so, it actually never was a train station, but instead, a repair shop for steam locomotives and, later on, a steel mesh factory. It is the new home to multiple cultural facilities: a cinema, an event space, the city music and ballet school, a large foyer with bar, as well as the city theatre, which had previously operated in an historic building in the inner city, bursting at the seams. The important impulse for the competition, advertised in 2015, was to transform this industrial railway ruin into a large-scale cultural centre. This task was by no means a simple one. Following wartime damages, vacancy and a fire in the year 2014 only fragments of the historic sandstone facade had remained. Where it was possible, the existing facade was carefully cleaned and repaired. In other places, new concrete elements in sandstone hues were introduced, such as the central columns of the arches and the tripartite frame structure of the upper floor, which conceals an aluminium post-beam facade. The southern facade with the stage entrance and the eastern gable-end facade are completely new. The latter features a profiled structure that refers to the original facade. While the architects transformed the former arches into rectangular apertures, the arches still define the aesthetic impression of the existing building on both the exterior and interior.
