Have a seat! This call had animated 25 Chemnitz residents to submit design ideas for their city. 13 of them could have been realistically implemented and ten also received the prize money of 2025 euros after an online vote. Now the winners are working on the implementation. In a series of official journals, we want to gradually introduce the individual projects in more detail – today the power box gallery on the Brühl.

Friedrich Benzler has already brought a lot of colour into the city. In Gablenz, on the Sonnenberg, in the centre – he has already designed power boxes everywhere, including gable walls and other open spaces. They are documented and sometimes commented on on his Facebook page. “Can you do the ones you do here on the Brühl?” is written under a photo in August 2018, for example. The question was asked by Hendrik Gransee, obviously not without emphasis. In the meantime, Friedrich Benzler has started to design a few power boxes on the Brühl.

“The motifs are intended to remind us of vanished shops on the Brühl, which are part of the history of the quarter,” says Hendrik Gransee, an active and avowed Brühl resident. In January, he submitted the idea to “Nimm Platz” – the campaign on the way to the European Capital of Culture 2025, which, with a prize money of 2025 euros, is intended to help Chemnitz residents take the initiative themselves to design the city, the residential quarters, of unused spaces.

Hendrik Gransee sees the designed power boxes as a “wonderful addition to the large-format murals that already exist on the boulevard. The Brühl is thus once again becoming an open-air gallery to be experienced.

During the Brühl Kiez, the 14-day neighbourhood festival in September, Friedrich Benzler then sanded down and primed the power boxes on Hermannstraße and applied the planned motifs. They are not quite finished yet, however, and the artist plans to work on them again by the end of October. Other boxes will follow in the spring, because they are located on houses that are currently being renovated and scaffolded.

Hendrik Gransee is nevertheless already very satisfied. “As soon as the boxes are designed, they are no longer marked with graffiti tags or other graffiti. Experience has shown that it is of little use to remove tags regularly, but confiscating the surface with art is more likely to help,” he says, and also finds it good that there are campaigns such as “Take a seat” that make such ideas financially possible. In any case, a creative signature has now been added to the Brühl and Chemnitz has become a bit more colourful. That’s good.

Photo: Ernesto Uhlmann