If you stand on the ground and want to look at the flat roof of a skyscraper, it's not that easy.
But if you have grown tall, stand on tiptoe, still pull on the roof edge, then that is possible - at least with the 53 meter high “Goliath”, a former high-rise complex in the city of Marl.
So actually 53 meters, because Goliath has shrunk a lot.
A young birch tree spreads its branches over the seventeen storeys, the purple blossoms of a summer lilac stretch towards the loggias and window fronts of the 153 apartments.
From big to small is the principle of Legoland or Minimundus or as the miniature worlds are all called, which shorten our world to a strolling radius and combine buildings from different places into a dollhouse-friendly cosmos.
An interesting variant of this principle has now been created in Duisburg.
In contrast to the classic attractions such as Legoland, for which Günzburg even had to widen the motorway to three lanes for better accessibility, this ensemble called “Neustadt” is almost hidden in the Duisburg Nord landscape park.
There, the former Meiderich ironworks with its blast furnaces is one of the Ruhr area's tourist magnets.
Prefabricated buildings par excellence
But the man at the gate sends you into a wide meadow landscape opposite and there onto a dead straight asphalt road - a cycle path called the Green Path. It uses the route of the Emschertal Railway, which was shut down and dismantled in this section in 1987. There are still a few tracks in the meadows next door, densely overgrown by greenery. Once the freight trains rattled between all the mines, coking plants and huts, the chimneys steamed, the soot trickled. Today there is a spacious, quiet park in which the Alte Emscher winds towards the Rhine and has long since ceased to be a sewer, but has been renatured and even offers pike and catfish a home.
Yes, the Ruhr area has made itself quite pretty in parts - also by clearing away a lot of old and dirty things. Then suddenly, on the left, on a small sandy hill, where the park hits the graffiti-painted substructures of the A 42, there are miniature houses of long-torn Ruhr area buildings. Quite a few of them were concrete monsters. Not only does the bolt of the Goliath slide into the area - three meters long, which corresponds to a good 75 meters of the original - there is also the Bergkamen City residential tower, once a sixty meter high building, on the top of the hill. which stood like a mushroom on a concrete plinth several stories high. Or the white giants of Kamp-Lintfort: prefabricated buildings par excellence, mocked as workers' lockers and, like the other high-rise buildings, quickly social hot spots.And finally, decaying lost places. Until the only solution that was longed for was what the planners call "demolition to floor level" or "vertical unsealing": the demolition or the wrecking ball. Now they are back in the park at a scale of 1:25.
They were newly created by the artist Marta Dyachenko and the artist Julius von Bismarck for the Emscherkunstweg, an axis with installations and sculptures across the Ruhr area.
To which the Neustadt now also belongs, 23 models that Marta Dyachenko and Julius von Bismarck brought by ship from Berlin to the Ruhr area in a climate-friendly manner and arranged for a mini open-air museum of modern building in the district.