The Palimpsest & the Quarry

ETH Zurich: ETH Zurich Faculty of Architecture (D-ARCH), Zürich

Project idea

The challenging task in architecture is never just to built, and to built in order to enhance usability. But in architecture it is first and foremost the task to create identity - identity to foster a continuous engagement with the site, from the investor's side, the architect's view and the future occupant's stance. Therefore, the main drive of the project was to solve the conflicting urban situation not by adding inhabitable square meters, installing artificial green spaces or building event halls but to reveal the site's history in a way that triggers curiosity, stimulates imagination, and serves as a common ground for the public. The given site was a layering of train tracks, highway streets and an area for waste disposal within the urban fabric of Zurich.

Project description

«Sichtbarmachen» is the act of attuning to the environment, revealing it and rendering it conscious and foregrounded. Making visible the stratification, as a witness of time, incites the production of space by ensuring a site-specific identity. By subtracting material from the ground, the site’s palimpsest gets spatially tangible and considered in its temporality. The archeological attitude enables the place to be viewed in a threefold manner. You at once imagine the before, the now and the after - whether this may be due to laying bare existing groundwork or including different water levels into the site’s spatial experience. Generally immune towards the «buried», this project adds to the reading of the «absolute» city system. Revealing the site’s identity serves at once as a demonstration of the man-made and artificial and simultaneously unfolds the potential of the immanent and natural. Informed by the principles of archeology, the site’s stratification is investigated in its latent qualities as urban common ground. One’s culturally defined experience will be challenged to see new elements and enriched through multiple readings. The palimpsest of the topology is represented in a topography of events. The site as quarry, the place as palimpsest!

Technical information

The given site was an extensive perimeter which was tackled by a minimum of intervention to achieve a maximum of impact. The idea was not so much to add to the existing landscape but to subtract. Therefore, the technical means were limited to the installation of retaining walls and the subtraction of the soil. The technical precision laid in the application of the gigantic sheet pile walls and to secure their stability.