Parasite

Parasite

The word parasite comes from the Ancient Greek parasitos. Literally, it meant one who eats alongside or nearby. It was used to refer to poor people - musicians, entertainers - allowed to eat at the feasts of nobles in exchange for their entertainment. A parasite in this first meaning was an outsider admitted into the home. Admitted, but not welcomed. One who eats nearby, the parasite is not far, etymologically, from the neighbor.

Paris and the Parasite, Macs Smith, 2021

A parasite looks for niches, feeding off the surplus of others. It dissolves the boundaries between itself and the host, establishing a hybrid being. The Gauss-Stierli-Areal is one of the last non-developed sites from Zurich Nord’s industrial past. Going beyond the dichotomy between “Ersatzneubau” and “Erhalt” a parasitical approach to design offers spaces of continuous adjustment, mutation and transformation.

Sun, heat, humidity, wind and noise are the only contexts for the Gauss-Stierli-Areal, which lies as an island, cut off from the city by railway tracks. We will start with 1:1 hands-on interventions in the fringes of the site between industrial space and national infrastructure. The interventions amplify the potential of the environmental conditions, uncover how they interact with the site and drive the first steps towards transformation. We will then develop the architectural parasites gradually into bigger and bigger structures in our studio at HIL, primarily through model-making and time-based media. Over time, a self-reinforcing cycle emerges, dissolving the distinction between host and parasite, and eventually inverting their relationship. The simulation of growth in the projects will be accompanied by the real-time cultivation of mushrooms in the deadwood of our garden on Hönggerberg.

The Gauss-Stierli-Areal is on the eve of major transformation. If we want to retain this existing industrial heritage for future generations, could we write the script for its fringes to unburden the original structures from the pressures of development? What if the key to bringing more life and space into the city is not systematic but irregular, specific and opportunistic?

The Stierli-Areal is one of the last non-developed remnants of Zurich Nord’s industrial past. The 12’500m2 big triangular island is enclosed on three sides by train tracks, both producer and product of infrastructural junkspace. What used to be an advantage in the days where steelware needed to be transported throughout Europe, has become an obstacle to development and its integration in a rapidly growing part of Zurich. All plans to transform the site in the last 25 years have failed, much to the delight of the cultural practitioners and small-scale manufacturers using the site today.

Not even a year ago the plot changed hands once again. This time it is Werner Hofmann, an entrepreneur known for his unconventional interim use of the Hotel Atlantis as a gigantic student dorm, who believes in the potential of the plot. As a young plumber apprentice in the 70’s, he himself regularly frequented the Stierli-Areal, picking up steel parts for his daily work. Times have indeed changed and the Kantonale Denkmalpflege have both loosened and specified their inventory of the site, discharging many of the structures on site from protection. Soon schools, housing cooperatives, fitness studios, workshops and cultural spaces will state their room requirements and architects will find the economically optimized allocation of programme and space, resource and profit.

If we attempt to retain the valuable resource of the Stierli Areal for future generations, what other spaces could we occupy in order to unburden the existing structures from the pressures of development? Can we redirect our attention to other resources that are at infinite disposal such as heat, wind, noise as well as left-over spaces as entry points for architectural and landscape interventions that can grow over time and even ellipse their host, becoming the sustaining support for the existing itself.