Beschreibung
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Achtung: die Landschaft
Designing as strategy of remedial. Projects for the territories of the Swiss Mittelland
In 1955 Max Frisch, Lucius Burckhardt und Markus Kutter published Achtung: Die Schweiz, a warning about the increasing sprawl throughout the Swiss landscape and a plea for a new and more controlled level of urbanity in the form of high-density settlements. Fifty-nine years later, the level of alarm against the increasing levels of urban sprawl has not diminished and yet single-family houses and low-density settlements still unabatedly continue to erase the Swiss landscape. Openly alluding to the book of 1955, Achtung: die Landschaft attempts at offering a different yet radical alternative to the problems of land, landscape and resources consumption that contemporary forms of urbanization imply. Instead of new dense settlements built outside of the existing cities as advanced in 1955, we propose to place landschaft – land, landscape and the entire un-built territory – at the center of the architect’s attention. Already central to the current political and public debate (i.e. the Zweitwohnungsinitiative and the recent Raumplanungsgesetz), the understanding of the Swiss un-built territory will become the lens through which alternative visions for the future are now advanced. Based on extensive cartographic research and field work conducted over the past year at ETH Studio Basel, this semester students are asked to directly dive into design proposals that are able to reformulate the ways in which we live, work and move across these rapidly sprawling territories. If on the one hand projects are not bound to any programmatic prescriptions or scale of intervention, they are on the other to be based on few common imperatives:
• Rather than focusing on the built fabric, proposals need to define the limits and conditions of the un-built territory, intended as the space capable of offering coherence to an otherwise piecemeal pattern of urbanization;
• The critical selection of areas, sites, locations is the pre-requisite for strategic proposals that are able to resonate beyond their specific scope and thus affect a larger territory;
• Proposals are to be intended as remedial of what is already there and new constructions are accepted only if part of a densification strategy of what has already been built (built on built);
• Densification should take place where it is more meaningful in terms of living, mobility and production;
• Public mobility (trains and trams) along with slow mobility pattern should become the backbone for a new territorial reorganisation.
The geographical focus of the studio will be the Swiss Mittelland, the grand central plateau that André Corboz already in 1994 described as the seat of a territorial city stretching from St.Gallen to Geneve. Within this vast region, three large sites have been selected and will become the focus of design proposals that lie at the intersection between architecture, urban design and landscape architecture. These three sites are: the Muttenz-Rheifelden region (BL), the Ergolztal (BL) and the larger Olten region (SO/AG). Students will select one of the three proposed sites and, based on the analytical work and numerous resources already available, will be asked to advance from the very beginning radical yet specific projects that are able to subvert the current logics of contemporary urbanization.
The studio is open to 12 students that will be working in parallel with 12 students coming from the GSD/Harvard University. All students will initially work in teams of two (6 ETH teams + 6 GSD teams). Following the first weeks of studio work, teams composition could be re-arranged according to emerging synergies.
The studio meets every Tuesday and Wednesday at ETH Studio Basel, where students are offered generous studio space, IT and printing facilities.
The studio is organized through various activities:
• Weekly tutorials and desk-crits
• Field work
• Internal seminars
• Lectures with invited guests
• Integrated seminar week Grand Tour of the Swiss Mittelland
The studio will be closely collaborating with the ETH chair of Philip Ursprung and participating students can write a "Wahlfacharbeit" in history of art and architecture under his supervision.
The integrated seminar week (20-24 October 2014) will be the occasion to take part in a grand tour that, instead of lake cities and alpine resorts, will bring us across the Swiss Mittelland from the Appenzell to Geneva. During this intense week, moving alternatively by bus, bike and on feet, we will be offered the possibility of observing and understanding the origins, reasons and specific characters of a rapidly urbanizing territory. The week will be organized around a series of excursions, visits, meetings and interviews, and will offer a cruel portrait of a large territory in which unequalled beauty and layered heritage are directly confronted by squalid ugliness and dull anonymity. The seminar week represents a complementing component of the studio and participating students are asked to prepare, at the end of the week, a written reportage on a specific topic of choice related to the tour.
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