in collaboration with:
Chair of Construction Heritage and Preservation, Prof. Dr. Silke Langenberg, Reto Wasser
Chair of History and Theory of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke, Linda Stagni


AUFBRUCH

reinterpreting the hard by reconnecting the soft

an impulse for an ecological network that challenges the idea of green and public space

A Change Of Perspective

Today’s city reflects the anthropocentric conception of life and legislation. The built environment defines where Flora and Fauna can take place in the city fabric. Even further, humans control the form of it. In empty spaces – spaces where the human takes a low or no ordering power - nature happens, creating spaces of high ecological value. Due to the high regulation in Zurich, the ongoing inner densification and lack of building land in Zurich, the pressure on these spaces is high. The unseen layer of biodiversity is decreasing silently under the power of planning in the city and missing awareness and priorisation.

Over the time, humans created a great number of diverse habitats in cities, where many species could arrive and adapt. Today there is a higher biodiversity in the urban fabric than on the countryside. But the ongoing human priorisation in city-planning causes more and more problems for the diversity, such as the fragmentation of habitats. Even if there are diverse and suitable biotopes for many species, they can’t become colonized due to the separating effect of the human-built barriers, like roads, bridges or walls. Or if the fragments are populated, extinction threatens, because of the lack of genetic exchange with other populations of the same species.

The serious inclusion of an ecological network as a priority in city planning is missing. The Qualitative and quantitative implementation of biodiversity as a planning layer fails until today, although the necessary knowledge is laid open since decades. Still, the degree of sealed surfaces is high, the fragmentation of habitats becomes worse, and heat and flood become increasingly visible and experienceable also for the human species. Flora and Fauna are missing a functioning ecological network. Reconnecting the habitats is one of the most important aims to work against the decreasing biodiversity.

For me, the focus on green and brown infrastructure is essential to the urban social life, comfort, and the future of a contemporary city. Architects are not only responsible for the built form but are equally agents for the ground and surrounding which the built forms. The Aufbruch questions the priorisation of the human in the urban fabric. By promoting biodiversity as planning layer, the Aufbruch introduces a different image of urban nature and includes species of the urban Flora and Fauna on an equal level as the human species.

Reinterpreting the hard, means to reintegrate it in another way into the new design of the square. The Aufbruch reconnects the soft by unlocking and reshuffling what is there, taking growth and decay and the seasonal cycles into account as part of the development. The project aims to give an impulse for further developments in the city to create an accommodating network that allows all urban beings to move, stay and encounter.