ost:end's Jonathan Warneck Lays Out Plans for Leipzig's Tanklager West Cultural Quarter

Leipzig has been quietly building a reputation as one of Germany's more interesting club cities — not Berlin, not trying to be Berlin — and the people behind ost:end want to keep it that way. Co-operator Jonathan Warneck has been speaking openly about the next chapter: Tanklager West, a sprawling former industrial site that the team intends to transform into something more layered than a straightforward club development.

More Than a Dancefloor

Warneck's framing is deliberate. In a recent interview with Groove, he described Tanklager West not simply as a venue project but as a Kulturquartier — a cultural quarter — with the dancefloor functioning as one component among several. The list he offers is telling: a club, yes, but also a Kunst-Kontor (an art production and workspace hub), a cultural meeting point open to a broader public, and — perhaps the most unexpected entry — a Permagarten, a permaculture garden.

That last element alone signals that this isn't a purely commercial real estate play dressed in underground aesthetics. Permaculture gardens don't turn a profit. They signal intent.

Leipzig's Industrial Inheritance

The site itself carries the weight of the city's post-industrial geography. Tanklager West — literally "tank storage west" — is the kind of found space that Leipzig has occasionally turned into something culturally significant before the property market caught up. The question is always whether the vision holds once the construction crews arrive and the costs start compounding.

ost:end has been operating long enough to understand the pressures. Leipzig's club scene exists in a different economic register than Berlin's, which means less institutional support but also less of the burnout that comes with scale. Warneck appears to be betting that a mixed-use model — art, community, ecology, and nightlife — creates more resilience than a venue that lives and dies on weekend door revenue alone.

What the Quarter Might Actually Look Like

Concrete details remain limited at this stage, but the stated components sketch a rough picture:

• Club infrastructure — the existing ost:end operation would presumably anchor the nightlife function, likely with outdoor and indoor capacity suited to the industrial footprint of a former tank storage facility.
• Kunst-Kontor — studio and workspace infrastructure for artists, positioned as a production hub rather than a gallery-style consumption space.
• Cultural meeting place — programming that doesn't require a ticket or a willingness to stay until 6am. Arguably the hardest thing to sustain financially.
• Permaculture garden — green space managed according to permaculture principles, which tends to function as both environmental statement and slow community-building infrastructure.

The Risk

Projects of this scope in German mid-sized cities have a mixed track record. The ambition is real; so is the gap between vision documents and operational reality. Funding structures, municipal cooperation, and the simple logistics of running four distinct operations on one site all create friction that earnest mission statements don't resolve.

What Warneck and the ost:end team have in their favour is an existing track record in Leipzig and a model that, if it holds, would be genuinely interesting — not as a template to be replicated in seventeen other cities, but as something specific to this site, this city, and this moment in how post-industrial European spaces get used.

More details on the Tanklager West development are expected as the project moves through planning phases. The Groove interview marks the first substantive public communication about the project's scope.