Atelier Esch

BSc 3 / Msc 1 / MSc2

For centuries, rebuilding existing houses or putting together new buildings from old parts was at least as normal as building anew. The wealth of relationships that such buildings open up, their ‘complexity and contradiction’, touch us contemporaries much more deeply than our − often merely pragmatic − ancestors. Now, the urgency of sustainable strategies compels us to reconsider rebuilding, repurposing, reinterpreting what has already been built. A bulky industrial site in the middle of Zurich serves as a suitable test object. We examine its past, talk to the people who have settled there today and create scenarios for its future.
Architecture is considered the art of spatial interrelationship. But it is at least as much the art of interrelating in time. This is what we want to work on.