Schlieren

Schlieren

This semester, we are following the overarching topic “Re-Purpose Schlieren,” set by Prof. Susann Vécsey.

To make a building is to make the territory. From a single step adjusting ground to a humble windowsill, design crosses culture with climate to define how we dwell. And whether built or grown, our environment is designed and constructed in a combination of modest fragments and great ensembles.

This semester’s brief takes us to the outskirts of Zurich, along the Limmat Valley in Schlieren. The territory lies between the forest and the riverbed of the Limmat, intersected by the railway tracks, shaped by an industrial past and by more recent suburban growth, often described through the pejorative term of sprawl, a word used to distinguish the supposedly unregulated periphery from the ordered city.

Yet this distinction becomes difficult to sustain when we look closely at the territory. Perhaps tellingly, the ISOS inventory records only one specific area in Schlieren-the former gasworks site-while leaving much of the existing built environment unrecognised. This condescension seems a poor response to the environment that sustains everything we cherish in urban life. Life outside the city walls is intimately integrated to everything within. The supply chains for goods are organized and distributed in the periphery. The infrastructure that keeps us connected, supplied and above all it provides the setting for everyday life to the majority of the population whether at home or at work.

In response, we aim to record the current state of Schlieren through an Atlas: a survey that describes the richness, contradictions, and ruptures of this territory. Rather than producing a single reading or establishing a fixed position, the Atlas should allow multiple narratives of the place to emerge. Through drawing, mapping, photography, measurement, and making, we shall experience the territory from different perspectives and scales. The three sites of the brief are understood as instruments for this investigation: scales from which to begin a survey, moving between the area, the line, and the point, and from the larger territory, described by the river to the smallest fragment, centred on the gasometre and back again. In doing so, we ask whether these different scales can challenge the conventional boundaries of architectural practice and encourage a broader understanding of place. Can observing and recording become a way of reclaiming our environment? And can these observations return to architecture as more embedded and integrated forms of inhabiting the landscape, where nature and culture are no longer separate?

This leads us to consider re-purposing not only as a response to sustainability, but also as an act of preserving memory. To re-purpose is not simply to re-use what already exists. It is to work with an existing condition through transformation while allowing it to acquire a new meaning. It can involve alteration, addition, subtraction, displacement, or even the deliberate disturbance of what is already there. How can architecture transform an existing condition without erasing its memory? And how can re-purposing become a way of producing new relationships between what was, what is, and what could be?