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

(RE)MIND THE GAP

The city-block typology has proven itself as a highly appreciated form of urban living. It offers not only affordable, dense, and flexible housing through the compact and efficient structural organization, but also enough common space. This generous social emptiness inside, on top and around the original city-block structures is generating a horizontal as well as a vertical movement flow, expanding the social realm for appropriation of its inhabitants. The newly introduced laws for the ‘Quartier-Erhaltungs-Zone’ are supporting a drastic declination of those qualities. With the possibility to transform both attic floors to private apartments, the common attics and roof terraces are endangered to be privatized and thereby cutting off the vertical social dynamism in the block, in the city-block and in the whole quarter.

The construction gap reveals the true development of the ‘Quartiererhaltungszone’. Once the gap is filled with the same volume, the city block returns to its inconspicuous state, the awareness starts to fade, and the critical voices fall silent. Therefore, I propose to re-install the forty tons of reinforcement steel in the other gap of the very same city block and by extension to re-instate the ‘Feldweg’ that led through the city block until the beginning of the 20th century, thus compensating for the loss of the vertical and horizontal social flow of movement caused by the laws of the building and zoning regulation of the city of Zurich.

In the end, this intervention is a ‘gentle reminder’ of an urgent problem, not in the sense of a reconstruction with didactic character, but rather as a playful reinterpretation, as a symbol for the finite validity of urban planning decisions. Designed as an auxiliary construction to counteract the law of gravitation, the beams alter their function, referring to the socially dynamic and fruitful qualities of the quarter, which are to be suppressed in today's consciousness.

Moreover, it is conceptualized as an inception of a beautiful thought, which could grow in the mind of the homo urbanus. It is an idea how a few pieces of steel could start growing over, under and through the existing built mass, holding together instead of keeping apart, making a demolition of a block impossible, transforming the built mass into one interrelated organism. In a bigger scale it is a vision of an alternative, enthusiastic and culturally rich cohabitation that supports socially productive interactions through the unconditional cultivation of the common.