Studio Eva Prats, Building Communities – ETH Zürich 2021 (FS21)
Spring semester 2021 (FS21)
> See more about the studio
> Project films
> See detailed material from each student project at the Studio Eva Prats Website (external link)
Visiting Professor: Eva Prats
Adviser: Ricardo Flores
Teaching Assistants: Annina Meier & Guillaume Guisan
Students:
Isabel Ammann
Romano Fischer
Samuel Giblin
Leonce Gruber
Helia Jamshidi
Paula Kiener
Melanie Kofler
Severin Kurt
Manuel Lorz
Ivana Luggen
Theo Mayer
Hiep Nguyen
Amanda Pellizzari
Clothilde Peyronnet
Natalia Pieroni
Alice Sorg
Ahn Tran
Anna Travaglini
Eleni Werder
Sarah Wirth
Chaoyi Yu
The Studio
Building communities implies creating relationships that hold together people and things from different backgrounds and different times, a community between new and old neighbours, between new and old fragments of a built city in which, in the end, everyone, people and things, live in a new unity.
We understand urban rehabilitation as the balance between the recovery of a physical fabric and a social fabric: both complement each other and work at the same time. To read the memory contained in buildings and in people is to think about a future that counts on that past.
The ‘Building Communities’ Studio works with two parallel objectives:
- The recovery of a fragmented urban fabric, studying the possibilities of rehabilitation from the insertion of new programs, where housing will be the main but not the only one. The concrete tests of physical transformation of existing structures for the incorporation of houses or other complementary programs, within criteria of sustainability from the rehabilitation of obsolete architectures, is the main working material of the studio.
- The definition of the typology of the house and its grouping -the community adapting it each time to the area of the city where it is located.
FS21
The studio worked in a very central neighbourhood of the city of Zurich, an area of discontinuities between urban fabrics, strong changes of scales and programs that coexist connected to each other: the infrastructure, present in the train industry linked to the nearby Hauptbahnhof and the new bridge of the Durchmesserlinie, defining a hard edge along Neufrankengasse; the housing program, visible in the dense city blocks around Langstrasse and Feldstrasse, that were all built during the same period; the few but valued public spaces, under the trees of Schöneggplatz, in the historical park of Bäckeranlage, at the large square of Helvetiaplatz and more recently along Europaallee; informal programs such as the numerous garden-restaurants, motorbike shops and car retailers; undefined spaces in-between isolated buildings, today occupied mainly by parking spots, many of them remaining empty.
The enormous scale of the Europaallee development and its long pedestrian axis is colliding with the smaller, domestic scale of the old neighbourhood around Langstrasse and Neufrankengasse. This area of Kreis 4, characterised by its fragmentary character and “backyard” condition that has prevailed for over a century, suddenly receives a new exposure in the city that should be addressed.
Our working area was focused on two triangular plots formed by the curve of the train tracks and the Seebahn-line on the one side, the Feldstrasse and the Schöneggstrasse on the other, meeting on the perpendicular hinge of Schöneggplatz.