Planned city, unplanned descent: Wolfsburg faces the drop
A postwar model of rational urbanism now hosts its most irrational Saturday in decades
Wolfsburg was not discovered; it was decided. In 1938, planners drew a city from nothing on the Mittellandkanal, ordered around a single productive purpose: to manufacture the Volkswagen, the people's car. The streets followed grids, the green spaces followed ratios, and the civic buildings that arrived across the following decades followed ambition — Hans Scharoun's theatre, a modernist art museum, and eventually Zaha Hadid's phæno science centre, a structure so aggressively futuristic it looks like it arrived from a different planning committee altogether. What the founders did not plan for was a Saturday in May when VfL Wolfsburg, the verein that carries the city's identity on its back, would kick off against Bayern München needing a victory to remain in the Bundesliga.