Essen
Coal Cathedral
Portrait
Zollverein Shaft XII opened in 1932 to a Bauhaus-influenced design of steel frames and cubic volumes — deliberately beautiful for a coal mine, and known as such at the time. It closed in 1986, the coking plant in 1993, and the complex is now a design museum, a swimming pool in a former slag site and an ice rink in the coking channel.
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