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Designers: Florian Budke
- Area: 1000 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Marius Heimburger, Daniel Schulz
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Manufacturers: Mapei
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Lead Architect: Florian Budke
Text description provided by the architects. Mannheim, a city in southwest Germany, is known for its square-grid layout, its palace, and its city landmark – the Wasserturm (water tower) and its baroque gardens. In the northern part of Mannheim, the city center – interrupted by the Neckar River – borders the districts of Neckarstadt West and East. This direct location on the river has led to the development of a green corridor – the Neckarwiese – as an urban open space, which is used by the city’s citizens for leisure and sports activities. Upstream, in the direction of the university hospital, there is a publicly accessible basketball court on Hermann-Heinrich-Ufer, which has been badly damaged by various floods in recent years.
Surrounded by two high-rise complexes – the Collini Centre and the Neckaruferbebauung – the court forms a multifaceted urban as well as natural situation with the adjacent Neckar and the Friedrich Ebert Bridge. The Austrian energy drink manufacturer Red Bull took this inner-city interplay as an opportunity to select the basketball court as a stopover for its Half Court Basketball Tour, and to renovate and redesign it in the process. The resulting work, in the form of a super-graphic, is entitled: 68 – Mannheim.
The commissioned graphic designer Florian Budke – who usually takes a typographic approach in his work – wanted to create a local reference to the city: “In my projects, it is important to me that the graphic always links to the place as well as the people and enters into a relationship with them - this happens here in the form of an oversized “68” (the first digits of the postcode), the lettering Mannheim, the abstracted water tower and the colors of the city – a super-graphic from Mannheim for Mannheim.”
The painting of this sequence of numbers, which covers an area of more than 1000 square meters, can be perceived – analogously to sports jerseys – as a gigantic back number of the city of Mannheim. Its formal language establishes a reference to the baroque open space design of the Mannheim – the city's landmark. To emphasize the connection to this urban icon, structural elements such as the water tower itself, the fountain, and the plant embedding were incorporated into the super-graphic by means of abstract symbols.
The center of the playing field – the water tower - has a further, hidden design depth: viewed from the Friedrich Ebert Bridge, a basketball hoop can also be recognized in it, linking the location with the sport on offer. The upper part of the number 6 can be perceived as an “arm” that transports the grey-black basketball into each basket. After the successful tour stop of the Red Bull Half Court Series, the court was handed over to the public and has been in lively use ever since. “It’s nice to see that the Super-graphic is more than just a visual object through daily use. The court has once again become a place that invites people to meet, linger and ultimately play basketball together – 68 Mannheim – from and for Mannheim!” says Budke.
