The pressure of capital is consuming the open spaces and its the under-used buildings that typically provide slack for the experimental and provisional uses of the city, a contingency for an unforeseen future. While this has been the case in world cities like London and New York for almost twenty years, Zurich, with its smaller size, its loose morphology and more active planning policy, has offered some resistance to these pressures – until now.
Today, every part of the city becomes part of an underused ground awaiting irrigation by the bloated funds of Swiss banks and pensions. Urban territory has not always been simply a financial asset class, and cities have not always been such an attractive prospect. As recently as the 1970s there were serious debates about whether the city had a future at all. Dirtier, noisier, and poorer than today, London bore the effects of a three-day week, underpopulation and frequent power cuts. New York City was also in decline: dangerous, and in 1975 on the brink of bankruptcy. Zurich’s Niederdorf, with its cheap rents and untidy charm, was a magnet for the city’s bohemian society – for students, artists, the emerging gay scene; for the marginal, recreational, and not always legal activities of the city. In those times, it was apparent that the post-war social democratic consensus was coming to an end, and yet, as crisis followed crisis, cracks within the inexorable progress of capitalism created space for a productive idealism to flower, one that was emancipatory and that worked in a light and provisional way. Out of the hedonism of the 1960s emerged feminism, gay rights and environmentalism, whose agency took root in the empty spaces and under-occupied buildings of the inner city. Squatting became a social movement as well as a way to live cheaply for new kinds of citizens who not only fixed up the decaying building stock, but also brought a new society back into the empty shell of the city, forming communes and other kinds of experimental households. Existence was not defined by work and earnings, but instead by the balance and the artistry that one brought to living, and the way in which individual lives enriched the neighbourhood and society.
In 2020, as the late-capitalist consensus might finally be wearing thin, are these not qualities that we could once more bring to the fore in our discussions about the city? Thurgauerstrasse once embodied a kind of corporate glamour, providing new, deep modern office space within an expanded idea of the city. As a piece of urban infrastructure it balanced public and private forms of transportation like a golden thread that linked the historic core to the airport and beyond. This was a visionary development that expanded the geography as well as the psychology of the city. For not entirely rational reasons, the likes of UBS and Credit Suisse no longer inhabit the palaces that line this corporate boulevard, and with the exception of interesting multi-tenanted outliers like the Oerlikerhus, a purpose built cooperative for SMEs built in the 1970s, this once corporate haven lies half-empty and with an uncertain future.
Glattpark, only a few steps away from the corporate behemoths of 1980s Thurgauerstrasse, offers an entirely different version of the city, one dominated by a narrow idea of housing and utterly lacking in drama and presence. It is not easy to love Glattpark, a territory predicated on supposedly good apartment plans and seemingly little else, yet the urban studies that are currently being undertaken that speculate on the future of Thurgauerstrasse and its environs are like nothing so much as Glattpark, or Schlieren, on steroids.
Today’s discussions about density are worlds apart from the densities and diversities that underlie the qualities of urbanity of the historic city core. The ingenuity of planners and architects is preoccupied by high rises and clever resolutions of the two hour shadow rule to produce more and more volume. This produces suburbs along the Glatt and Limmat that have little to do with the city centre, with the Cité Vert, or other 20th century visions of urbanity that in the past promised new complexities and a better way of life. Contemporary developments produce instead an endless, high density version of the agglomeration, a predictable asset that is understood by the financial world. There is no reason why Thurgauerstrasse could not become a laboratory for the experimental and vibrant future of Zurich. The empty and decrepit shell of Niederdorf was not such an obvious place to attract students, artists, activists and start-ups in the 1970s, and today, the appeal of Thurgauerstrasse could be enhanced by new building regulations and innovative tenure arrangements, following the example of Oerlikerhus, which actively resists gentrification. In reality there are many reasons why this will not happen, which are governed by the property market, land ownership, and building regulations, but it is possible to imagine a situation when these forces loosen their grip.
The question that this diploma theme asks, therefore, is: what needs to change in order for Thurgauerstrasse to become a vital and renewed part of the city. This question will be answered in equal part with a challenge to regulations and mainstream financial viability calculation, as it will with more conventional design work.
The topic B (building scale) was set by Prof. Caruso
