Braunwald: Place of Longing II
Braunwald: Place of Longing II
Focus Architecture & Material FS21
Module Leader Prof. Lando Rossmaier
Guests Prof. Gion A. Caminada, Flurin Bisig
Lecturers Prof. Lando Rossmaier
Experts Yves Dusseiller, Prof. Dr. Uwe Teutsch, Thomas Rimer
Assistant Anthony Frank
Create Context with Your Own Fiction
Last semester, we dedicated ourselves to an actual request from a client in Glarner Grosstal. The goal was to create an artificial lake along the Linth below Hätzingen. Holiday and apartment homes would be docked there.
A natural hollow formed the lake. That accentuated the empty space between the towns of Adlenbach and Hätzingen. So far, so good, but how and whether to build a holiday village there, indeed if one wished to refer to the familiar images at all, was something we explored under the title ‘Living Fallow Lands: Retreat & Recreation in Hätzingen, Glarus’. We wanted to solve the paradox of touristic concerns. We wanted to understand the tightrope walk that had to be mastered and where the unrecognised opportunities lay. Can we make a contribution of lasting relevance? For that, we needed an entire semester and several discussions with our guests, Thomas Paturet and Gordian Blumenthal.
One of the biggest hurdles – and there were several – was that we were supposedly working in an open field around an empty space and yet every intervention related to the organic structure of settlement, however much some tried to overcome that. The romantic projects that were artificially simulating a connection to nature had to admit that their strategy would not work. The more successful ones were those that could, on the one hand, preserve the relationship to the existing and yet, on the other hand, make a fresh and strong contribution by way of their own personal idea of recreation and a change to the usual ideas about housing. It turned out that those works that were based on existing settlement structures or spatial typographies but then overwrote them with their own fiction were the most successful ones. The new needs the existing. Both sides are necessary, because the unfamiliar needs the familiar so that what is different is perceived as new and not just as foreign.
With Hans Döllgast’s Künstlerhof or Zumthor’s Dierauer House, we learned how new things can be created from the familiar. A simple, repetitive courtyard was fitted with a slender, tall, round tower. In the case of the Dierauer House, an traditional setting was inscribed with a new twist with a little of the empirical in the setting and a crosswise roof. But is such a strategy suitable for every design task? What if it needs more than a de-familiarisation, if the place is not so much supposed to affect the building as the building shapes the space, if it needs more ‘impact’ to revive the impoverished place?
Braunwald as a Place of Longing
For this inversion of the theme, we go to Braunwald. That car-free holiday village is located above our studio. Its southern slope was transformed from an Alpine pasture into a chic spa town and later into a holiday village. Like many other holiday resorts, Braunwald has also shrunk because of lack of demand. Some claim that this is due to the inaccessible, distant location, which can only be reached via a funicular. Some voices express a longing for a road into the valley.
But what is it really lacking? To answer that, you have to know not only the situation in Braunwald but also the situation of the entire Glarus countryside. Our primary goal should not be to build for tourists. That, we learned, would be a mistake. We want to build for the people of Glarus and the surrounding cantons. Tourists will then come of their own accord. That is the simple basis for authentic tourism – and sustainable tourism, because the place will continue to function even if one day there are no longer any visitors.
We don’t believe the place can be revived by building more holiday homes or improved by addressing the question of access. Those working from home and digital nomads will not have sufficient influence either. Our thesis is that a new, strong narrative is needed. A powerful, present architectural complement on a large scale. Of the size and effect of a “fairy-tale” or “music” hotel. That is the ambition that we want to pursue with you this semester.
We will determine the right place in Braunwald and the fiction that will sufficiently viable by discussing them with residents, hoteliers and engineers. That will be the open and challenging part of the task. Our hope is that architecture can create a place of longing for the long term, an auratic original in Walter Benjamin’s sense. Perhaps some of you will manage it this semester. We are looking forward to this venture with you.
Rufi- Living Fallow Lands
Rufi- Living Fallow Lands
Focus Architecture & Material HS20
Module Leader Prof. Lando Rossmaier
Guests Gordian Blumenthal, Thomas Paturet, Flurin Bisig
Lecturers Prof. Lando Rossmaier
Experts Yves Dusseiller, Prof. Dr. Uwe Teutsch
Assistant Anthony Frank
We are assuming a paradox that is probably rather rare: authentic tourism. Although Switzerland was originally a place of longing, fully of myths and experiences of nature, it successfully began to develop its mountain landscape as a tourist destination and later, no less successfully, turned the mountains into sporting equipment and created new sources of longing, nevertheless the answers to the question of how visitors are to be housed range from the superficial to the unsatisfying.
Good examples are few and far between and often laden with clichés. How can one be close to a place, have a connection to it, if one only stays there for a few short, overly eventful days? How can one experience the landscape if hundreds or even thousands of others are doing so at the same time? There is nothing tourists hate more than other tourists. Another paradox.
We do not have the temerity to believe we will find valid answers during this semester. Nevertheless, we want to permit ourselves to ask what tourism or recreation could really be. What sort of qualities can a ‚fallow land‘, to borrow a term from the title of Studio Basel‘s urban planning studies of Glarus Süd, development? To that end, we want to start from the site and its possibilities.
In this master‘s focus, we understand materials not only as a local, sustainable and perhaps even circular product for construction but also very generally as a rational resistance. The existing materials themselves thus become a participant along with the architect. This view is the foundation of our way of working. It relieves us of the need for singular, Individual achievements – or, more precisely, It opens up for us a subtler perception and therefore more universal answers.
The task of putting buildings in a not very populated valley raises the very general question of how noticeable the intervention will be. How different are culture and (cultivated) nature, how do we design the relationship between unspoilt scenery and refinement by means of design? In the end, we are confronted with the difficult question of how identical and authentic a vacation village can be. Is it advisable to keep building on existing images?
Authenticity In the sense of an original, as a design objective, has probably increased in value over the last decade, because following a canon of rules based on the latest isms gave way to a personally coloured self-exploration whose means of making its essences or qualities plausible were coherence and perhaps even logic.
Designing an original, which in this context can never be original, has long been a paradoxical and yet powerful narrative that in the Alpine regions has been conveyed by postcards and travelogues. Think of the presentation of fortress-like colossi taller than some mountain peaks or of the romantic placement of some hotels in front of waterfalls or bodies of water in general.
We want to start understanding architecture as an expansion or reinforcement of the features of the landscape. To that end, we do not start with our ideas of houses or ground plans or questions of comfort or ideas about use. We begin with the image of the landscape. An artificial lake whose name still needs to be invented.
During the semester we will study buildings that engage in exemplary ways with the relationship of housing and landscape. In the process, we will get a sense of diverse types of design in the interplay with the landscape, no matter whether that landscape is natural or artificial.
Around the lake, between the road bridge and the canal and the existing village district of Hätzingen, potential use by tourist will be developed based on their ideas. It need not be based on my quick sketches. My planned expansion of the small-scale wooden buildings of Adlenbach and the solitary hotel building to the south are just the first, still superficial and perhaps unfinished ideas. We expect you to come up with your own idea and constellation of uses. Above all, however, an architectural answer that is worked out so that the immediate and more distant landscape are closely integrated.
Group works are not permitted, but we want to work and discuss together in the studio. We will work with Archicad Teamworks, 3-D printers, models, not with plans but with project handbooks. We will be in the studio on Wednesdays and Thursdays.