From industrial heritage to future hub: how raum13 is reimagining Cologne’s Deutz gas engine factory

Overgrown backyards, walls covered in graffiti, disused pipes jutting out between the buildings: where others see nothing but a ruin, Anja Kolacek and Marc Leßle see a cultural venue. For the two artists, the site of the former gas engine factory in Cologne is not a lost place, but a space for culture, memory and debates about the future.

The world’s first gas engine factory – Cologne’s industrial memory

The letters “G.F.D.” are emblazoned on a building on Deutz-Mülheimer-Strasse – probably the most striking relic of the Deutz gas engine factory’s past. Step onto the site and you’ll spot even more traces of those earlier days: sturdy brick walls, a crane hook hanging from the ceiling, dust-covered ventilation pipes, and faded speed limit signs.

Even the smell tells stories: “In some rooms, you can still smell that it used to be a foundry,” says Anja. There is a faint metallic tang in the air. On what was once the executive floor, meanwhile, old carpets and curtains from the 1950s and 1960s still hold the lingering smell of cigarette smoke from decades gone by, Marc says.

“For us, these are not just walls, but generations speaking to us about the world we live in,” says Anja. “There are 150 years of social change etched into this place.”

Under the name “raum13 Deutzer Zentralwerk der Schönen Künste” (Deutz Central Works of the Fine Arts), Anja and Marc staged theatre performances, concerts and exhibitions on the site from 2011 to 2021, always using art as a way to bring traces of the past into the present. When the City of Cologne purchased around 10,000 square metres of the site for €21 million in 2021, one thing was clear to both of them: a new era was beginning – and they began planning.

“It’s a place of global significance”: raum13 brings the former gas engine factory back to life

What began as a small engine factory in the 19th century grew into a major industrial company in the 20th: the Deutz gas engine factory (later Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz AG). Its engines were shipped all over the world, along with a technology that played a key role in driving industrialisation. “It’s a place of global significance – much bigger than we can really grasp,” says Anja.

For raum13, though, the industrial past of the gas engine factory is far more than a backdrop: it is a starting point for asking urgent questions of the present. “Industrialisation turned the world upside down. Today, with AI and digitalisation, we are going through another huge upheaval. Here, you can see how that kind of transformation has happened before and it’s a brilliant space to reflect on and imagine the future,” says Anja.

We used this history-laden site as the backdrop for our print magazine K wie Köln: designer JonasStickann posed for us in unisex fashion, with the images blurring any supposed boundaries between styles and genders, past and future, industry and culture.

Opening the courtyards: raum13’s first step in bringing the old gas engine factory back into view

The first plans are already taking shape: in early September, raum13 will open the site’s courtyards with a major exhibition featuring video, sound, text, images and sculpture.

The courtyards will become a stage for performances, concerts and other artistic formats. A continuous programme will run through to the end of December, bringing history to life – for instance when an actor reads from eyewitness accounts once collected by raum13 for a theatre piece, while the sound of engines hums in the background.

The programme is deliberately kept open. “We don’t yet know what September will bring, or what the site will have to say to us about the current social and global political situation,” says Marc.

Urban lab, offices, flats: what the old gas engine factory could become

But the courtyards are only the beginning. “The spaces themselves shape what can be done with them,” says Anja. The old executive floor, for example, will become a co-working space where companies can rent workspace in the short or long term – while preserving elements such as the former works council area. Another former office building is set to house an urban lab: an open workshop where research and experimentation can take place in collaboration with universities and companies. Looking further ahead, the two can also imagine student housing on the site.

The wider aim is for the site to spark the development of the entire Otto-Langen quarter around the old gas engine factory. But it’s a process: the applications currently underway are not just about artistic concepts, but also about building regulations and planning law. At the core of the project is a team of 7 people, supported by around 80 volunteers from a wide range of fields.

“We could never have imagined committing ourselves to such a long-term project,” says Marc. By now, both of them know that the former gas engine factory will stay with them for years to come: “It’s a project for eternity.”