In the evenings, this park bathes in a sea of colorful, ever-changing lights.
Duisburg is at the beginning of a whole trail of awe-inspiring sites like a former steelworks to the north of the city, which has been reconfigured into an urban park.In the folds of the Immanuel Kant Park the Lehmbruck Museum is devoted mostly to sculpture, and tracks the career of the Duisburg-based artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck.The museum has 100 or so of his works, as well as his sketches, drawings and paintings in a separate building.But Lehmbruck only makes up a fraction of a collection so large it needs to be reinstalled every year.You can view sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Beuys, Picasso, Käthe Kollwitz, Alexander Archipenko and Christo, to name a small few.There’s also 19th and 20th-century painting, mainly Expressionism from Die Brücke artists like Emil Nolder, Max Pechstein, Kirchner, August Macke, as well as art from the Bauhaus school by Ernst Eilhelm Nay and Max Beckmann.In Immanuel Kant Park you can tour the sculpture garden, furnished with 40 works, by Lehmbruck, Henry Moore and Méret Oppenheim.In the Meiderich district in the north of the city is a disused steelworks that has been turned into a public park.The facility shut down in 1985, and so in the early 90s, instead of demolishing the blast furnaces, conveyor bridges and chimney stacks the landscape architect Peter Latz decided to keep them.The ground was cultivated with plants to remove pollution from the soil, and where possible the infrastructure has been repurposed: The old sewage canals and railways are walking paths, a gasometer has become a scuba diving centre, while concrete bunkers have become gardens, walls now accommodate climbers and a blast furnace is a viewing tower.The Landschaftspark is on the Ruhr’s Industrial Heritage Trail and often ranks among the top city parks in the world.Anyone with an affinity for industrial architecture will want to spend some time in Duisburg’s Inner Harbour, which was the lifeblood for the industrial city up to the 1960s.From the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century the harbour was known as the “bread basket of the Ruhr”, storing grain in titanic granaries.After the immediate post-war period the harbour went into decline and lay disused for decades before a regeneration scheme in the 90s.Norman Foster drew up plans to turn Ruhr sites like this into districts for entertainment, offices and housing.And today there are parks, museums, restaurants and companies on the water, many in converted brick industrial buildings.In a lovely Art Nouveau public baths from the 1910s is a museum about the social and technical history of inland navigation.The museum is by the right bank of the Rhine, in the Ruhrort district, site of the largest river harbour in the world.In the hall of the former male swimming pool is a barge from 1913, while there’s a walk-through replica vessel in the ladies’ hall where you can get to grips with life and work on board.The museum also has three ships docked at the harbour ten minutes away on foot.Two of these can be visited: The Minden is a dredger launched in 1882 and using a bucket chain system.Commissioned in 1922 it is the last preserved paddle steamer on the Rhine.The eye-catching building, rising seven storeys over Duisburg’s inner harbour is half the appeal of this contemporary art museum.The structure dates to 1908 and was a granary, installed with 42-metre steel grain silos on its eastern side in 1934.