In Munich, just south of the Ostbahnhof, an industrial district has been reimagined into a new kind of urban fabric. The Werksviertel, a 2025 Core77 Design Awards Built Environment Honoree, developed by Steidle Architekten of Bavaria with designer Johannes Ernst, is neither a wholesale replacement of the past nor a singularly branded development. Instead, it operates as an urban interface—linking parkland, residential neighborhoods, and commercial areas into a coherent but flexible quarter.

With a focus less on spectacle and more on framework, Ernst and the team at Steidle Architekten show how adaptive reuse, incremental growth, and programmatic diversity can work together to produce an urban environment that is both grounded and open-ended. In doing so, the project demonstrates how architecture can shape not just buildings, but the very conditions for collective urban life.

Birds eye view of The Werksviertel by Steidle Artchitekten,

The design team resisted the impulse to erase the site's complexity. Existing activities and structures were not treated as obsolete but as assets. The strategy was to cultivate, consolidate, and update what was already there, while layering in new programs that would expand the quarter's capacity to host diverse forms of life. This gradualist approach acknowledges that urban vitality is rarely achieved through top-down planning alone.

Combining apartments, offices, hotels, hostels, fitness facilities, retail, and cultural venues, the project emphasizes diversity at multiple scales. These insertions were not conceived as isolated typologies but as components of a macroeconomic composition, designed to attract a wide range of tenants and sustain long-term viability. Public space plays a central role, with plazas, courtyards, and open event spaces designed to accommodate everything from casual gathering to large cultural programming. This layered spatial strategy ensures that the Werksviertel can absorb change—a constant in urban environments—without losing identity.

Check-out all the Core77 Design Awards 2025 Built Environment Honorees here.

If you're developing an innovative space, product, service, or, communications program we invite you to showcase your work in the 2026 Core77 Design Awards—Call for Entry opens January 2026.