Wonderfully Weathered Wood In Dortmund

As all the usual hotels I stay at in at Dortmund were full I was forced to stay at an anonymous, box like hotel on a dreek Industrial Estate(IE) on the edge of the city. To add insult to injury I was charged a rip-off rate taking advantage of the city being full. – normally for B&B in Dortmund I pay 55 Euro tonight it was paying 99.5 Euro – 4 star price at 1 star hotel.

To cheer myself up the next morning I went for stroll around the estate and to my delight and surprise came across Hecker’s in the middle of this wasteland of functional buildings and spaces. Hecker’s was a conventional IE building – built as a price per square foot modernist box with much use of glass and steel and metal cladding with little architectural imagination and surrounded by assiduously marked out car parking space, with a grassed area to the side.

The grassed area was serene - a little oasis - a pool surrounded by steep banks with mixed green vegetation and the most wonderful, roughly-hewn, slenderly-shaped wooden figures and shapes in groups of three. The figures rose like totems commanding the space around them.

The whole Hecker plot and building was decorated with these wonderfully weathered wooden figures and shapes often in groups of three  Not so much a building and a car park more a sculpture park on a par with Yorkshire Sculpture  Park.  A pleasing distraction from the depression of the hotel and the Industrial Estate and their dour glass, steel and concrete edifices  A very pleasant surprise!