Feasibility Study: Reusing Vacancy - Highrise FK4
client: Kulturdezernat Stadt Oberhausen (Creative City Oberhausen) / published by kitev – Kultur im Turm e.V.
size: 5600 sqm
type: feasibility study, housing, heritage refurbishment, interior design
completion: April 2026
key words: post-war modernism, listed building, housing, community spaces, adaptive reuse, interior guideline, genius loci
role: project management, architectural concept and design, interior guideline
A listed residential tower of post-war modernism, full of small flats and empty of community. The study imagines it as a neighbourhood stacked vertically.
An icon with a problem
The tower at Friedrich-Karl-Straße 4 is one of the most striking buildings in Oberhausen’s city centre. As a listed icon of post-war modernism, it was named one of the “Big Beautiful Buildings” by Baukultur NRW, and it marks the entrance to the city right next to the main station. A neon slogan on its roof, “VIELFALT ist unsere Heimat” (“Diversity is our home”), has become a landmark of its own.
Up close, the picture changes. The shop windows on the ground floor are covered and give nothing back to the street. A busy road runs right past the main entrance. The courtyard behind the building is dark, untidy and used as a car park, and many people avoid it. Inside, the building consists almost entirely of very small flats, a structure that encourages anonymity and high turnover rather than a stable community. The tower also needs renovation and is not accessible.
There are strengths, too. kitev and the sociocultural centre Unterhaus have been active in the building for years, and the Unterhaus gallery brings art and life to the ground floor. Where shop windows are in use, they open the building to the street.
Participation Process
Participation in the tower showed a difficult truth. A neighbourhood party in front of the building brought coffee, food, music and an open invitation to share ideas, and almost nobody came, despite personal invitations at every door. This confirmed what years of work in the building had already suggested: there is little contact, little sense of community and little interest in one another.
An expert event in the building’s basement brought together the owner, architects, urban planners and the property sector. Reference projects from Berlin and Remscheid showed how participation and targeted interventions can transform similar buildings. Several clear recommendations came out of the discussion:
+ semi-public shared spaces alongside private flats are a proven way to strengthen post-war housing and reduce turnover
+ new uses should be tested floor by floor before they are fixed
+ a caretaker should look after the shared spaces
+ building and surroundings should be developed together
+ from the very beginning, the process must make sure residents are not displaced
Living together
The concept turns the tower into a building for shared living. Small flats remain the largest group, because demand for them is still high. Some flats are combined horizontally into larger units and shared flats, and others vertically into maisonettes, so that singles, couples, families and flatmates can live under one roof. The overall number of residents stays the same, and nobody is pushed out to make room for the new mix.
Shared spaces are added at different heights of the building: community rooms on two floors, a shared laundry room, and a roof terrace with a small urban garden at the very top, with views across the city. Each one is a reason to leave the flat and meet the neighbours. A caretaker, ideally someone living in the building, organises and looks after them until a self-sustaining community has formed. Step by step, a stack of private units becomes a vertical neighbourhood.
Opening the ground
The tower’s problems do not stop at its walls, so the concept extends into the surroundings. A new passage connects the street with the square behind the building and turns the feared courtyard into an open, well-lit and accessible entrance to the city centre. New entrances open the ground floor towards this path: a step-free main entrance for the residents, and direct access to the gallery and the sociocultural centre.
The garages, currently closed to residents, become a bicycle workshop, studios, small shops or storage, and bring life to the new square, especially at weekends. A few parking spaces give way to table tennis and a small skate area for young people. A green strip or cycle lane separates pedestrians from the busy road, and new street furniture invites people to stay instead of hurrying past.
The neighbouring building, originally planned together with the tower, completes the ensemble. A day-care centre on its ground floor answers the lack of childcare in this part of the city, its green courtyard becomes a protected playground, and step-free housing for older people fills the floors above.
Because the tower is listed, the façade is touched only where it truly matters. A single new window, matching the existing openings in size and proportion, brings light to a planned café and visibility to a hidden corner that has long attracted dumping and unwanted visitors.
Keeping the genius loci
The tower was a pioneering building in its time, and its quality is most visible in the careful design of its interiors. Today, flats are usually refurbished one by one as tenants move out, quickly and as cheaply as possible. The result is functional, but anonymous, and the building’s atmosphere slowly disappears.
The interior guideline takes the opposite approach. It identifies the elements that give the flats their character and shows how they can be kept or reinterpreted within the budget of rental housing:
Built-in wardrobes: floor-to-ceiling wardrobes, fitted into niches and hallways, once made the most of every corner. Each flat gets one again as a basic element. To save costs it can be reduced to its fronts, and its colour could mark the different flat types.
Floors: the warm, red-brown floor gave the rooms their soft and welcoming feel. It is replaced by natural linoleum or rubber instead of the usual vinyl. As a click system, individual tiles can be exchanged when damaged, which makes it more sustainable, healthier and easier to maintain.
Tiles: small pastel tiles in yellow, blue or pink lined the bathrooms and kitchens, and a soap dish was integrated directly into the tiling. This almost forgotten detail returns, either in its original form or reinterpreted as flush hooks, shelves and niches for everyday objects.
These are small, careful interventions. Together they give the tower back a clear identity from the inside and show that a building’s character does not have to be lost to modernisation. In the end, the study shows how a listed tower can stay true to its architecture and still become something new: a home where neighbours actually meet.
Team: kitev – Robert Barbarino, Sonja Broy, Mustafa Sercan Bulut, Petra Jablonická, Yannis Kulosa, Christoph Kremerskothen, Meryem Yigit; Stefan Schroer, Christoph Stark, Agnieszka Wnuczak (strategic guidance)
Consultants: Rüdiger Ihle (structural engineering), Lorsbach + Buschmann (fire protection)
