The studio will investigate a prominent site right at the transition of the former medieval fortification wall and historical core of Zürich. The site has a historical profile acting as gateway of the early concentric city extension in the mid of the 19th century. Adjacent to the lyric city garden of the Schanzengraben, to the old botanic garden and to the river Sihl, the broader context was the first highrise plan within the city center of Zürich. With the development of the public garden, a sequence of highrise buildings has been realized and forms today one of the rare combinations of 19th century block structures and free standing higher buildings of the early 1960. The studio bases its reflection of urban renewal on the hypothesis to remove the present and monstrous building of the former stock market. We will investigate a hybrid urban program which leads us to reconsider size, scale and heights of the current conditions. It is the intention of this studio to investigate the formal and spatial generative possibilities when the notion of hybridization is applied to an important brake of the existing city fabric, at both the architectural and the urban scale. The combination of multiple architectural programs, functions, and urban components within a single system inherently challenges the conventional view of building identity and our notion and understanding of an autonomous type. Mixing, assembling, arranging, and composing diverse identities in order to obtain a new singularity, in which the parts are recognizable but no longer restorable.

Metamorphosis

Two absolute volumes with a desire to unite.
Carved, pierced and unwrapped until their identities fuse, and a new entity is formed.
Tower, Wall and Plateau meet in convergence, where the eye opens to the city.
Leaving their former ambiguity behind, now approaching their purpose as typologies.
The Amalgamation has now become a metropolitan spine.
Accentuating the fulcrum of the site, raising the public through its body.

Synthesis

Schaulager Zürich aims to weave the missing component into the existing Stücheliplan, enriching the cityscape.
It seeks to create a connection between the street level and the historical Schanzengraben, through a new publicly accessible archive in the heart of the city.
Reclaiming vertical space from private enterprise and making it available it for communal use, it proposes programme at an elevated level and with panoramic views over the city of Zürich.