The Great Interior

Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things.

Learning from Las Vegas, 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour

Outside the interior lies just another, larger, interior. An interior which contains all nature. Until recently, the story of the city has mainly favoured the centre. In the centre architecture found the place for political and artistic representation. The city wall kept hostile outsiders out and concentrated power within. The edge served as a place of defence and exclusion even without a wall. But the emergencies of climate change and globalisation demand another more integrated solution. Architecture needs to find a new purpose and means and today, it is the edge, rather than the centre, which holds the promise for a new type of interior that includes rather than excludes; an interior which contains the whole landscape and our lives within. We shall go in search of utopias on the edge, a new integration of architecture and landscape on the fringes of Zurich. Much of it is already there in communities and ecologies just far enough from sight to escape from a given form. But what is it? It is not a park; it has neither its design or singularity. It is not a garden although it contains many. And it is certainly not a pre-existing nature found on the edge of Zurich although it is perfectly natural. This place is made, is maintained and is regulated yet it feels loose, informal, open, public and even occasionally refreshingly scruffy. It is not civic yet it is cultivated metropolitan space. The landscape of the edge could be seen as a great work of bricolage where a world of multiple uses and environments loosely and informally defined by fences, boundaries and architectures within an accommodating nature.

We shall make a collective Atlas of the Edge, the ecologies, architectures, construction, materials, botany, gardens, working spaces and social lives which find common cause with nature. At the heart of bricolage lies the inventory of existing material and means. If the task is at the scale of an individual maker the inventory is ostensibly simple: materials and tools. When looking at the scale of territory, the architect’s inventory is the survey, both record and fiction. The first act of design is to observe and document how the very smallest construction is fundamental to defining the territory and conversely how the bigger conditions of landscape, topography, climate and collective human affairs determine the small actions of everyday life.

We shall start where all of architecture began; in the garden, in our garden at Hönngerberg. We will survey and observe the nature of existing elements and design and build a new structure for the edge. We shall see how the centre has pressed up to the edge and left a space in need of attention.

Once built, the garden project could be seen as a primer for a larger investigation on the edge of the city. To observe how multiple uses and communities have settled within a richly constructed nature and, as the authors of the Garden City believed over a century ago, this integrated landscape may be the site of utopia. Bruno Latour’s Cautious Prometheus states; “What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting… the revolution has to always be revolutionized… the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical... What an odd time we are living through.”

We will ask you to develop a radical architecture based on the world that surrounds you and. We shall see that beyond the edge is not outside, in fact it is just another inside, an interior which is designed, constructed inclusive and productive. In essence, natural.