USI

Basler Paradies is a housing co-operative offering approximately 150 double-height residential units, incorporating maisonettes, studios, flat-sharing cooperatives, townhouses, and family flats. Forming a block with shared balconies and terraces, the generous courtyard hosts communal areas such as a woodworking workshop, bicycle atelier, green house, and vegetable garden. Everyone has their own vision of paradise; the project provides the possibilities to build your own. A temple of columns, a structure in its pure sense; the building is based on a grid system, consisting of vertical and horizontal prefabricated elements. Full circle material recycling is envisioned; demolition, separation, production, and construction are all planned to be carried out on-site. Thanks to the structural redundancy of the elements, which allow an open, flexible floor plan design, this results in open, contemporary typologies that encourage further appropriation and adaptation.

The project, inspired by an anecdote of a tree, a moth, and a bird explores how biodiversity fosters social connection, offering a series of targeted interventions in five urban conditions identified within the Gundeldingen neighbourhood: the primary axis, Güterstrasse, extending to the intersection with Reinacherstrasse; the vertical secondary axes; Tellplatz square and the courtyards of perimeter blocks. For each condition, the project offers a transformation of its urban asset, starting with a change in materiality, a redistribution of green spaces, and a transformation of the street from a space exclusively used for transit to a space for social interactions. The final objective of these proposals is to tackle upcoming temperature issues and their consequences on biodiversity’s survival in densely populated and built environments, while cherishing and protecting Gundeldingen’s urban unicity.

This project investigates the latent potential of Basel’s backyards (Hinterhöfe) by repurposing existing structures such as garages and old workshop buildings—remnants of 20th-century infrastructure. The initiative aims to reimagine property ownership and proposes transforming these garages into new, low-profit housing units, thereby revitalising the courtyards as semi-public spaces. The individual living units are designed with a lightweight and easily disassembled construction system. Beyond the housing units, the courtyard is enhanced with café and office spaces, fostering a vibrant microcosm and promoting diversity. This transformation also results in new connecting routes within the city fabric, providing a seamless link between Klingelbergstrasse and Maiengasse. These new pathways enhance urban mobility and accessibility, integrating the courtyard development more cohesively into the surrounding urban landscape.

Highwaytopia emerges from the opportunity that the Grenzacherstrasse offers to rethink our perception of highway infrastructure. The Rheintunnel plan allows the decommissioning of a central Basel motorway, inspiring new uses for such milieus. By reducing travel speed, the highway becomes a multifunctional backbone with a tramline, bike path, and pedestrian strip. Subtracting some of the built substance of the highway’s concrete viaducts, which cast a strong shadow, is the genesis for a new type of landscape that rises from beneath the overpass. This new penumbra landscape is defined by the interplay between light and shadows. Small music follies set on the highway replace car noises with music of the community. This parade of follies reflects the ephemeral nature of parades, becoming the new scenography of the highway until future experiments arise from needs that are yet to be known. This research sought opportunities to repurpose underused infrastructure in the realm of the ugly and uncanny.

The project is an aqueduct running through Dreispitz; it cools down the district, whilst drawing a pavement along the way. It catches rainwater from the slope of the Bruderholz hill and from the existing water tower on top of it, channels it into the site. The water line flows into a pool and connects a system of fountains in pocket spaces along the Magistrale. It travels through a gutter in the ground, following the slope of the street, ending in the reservoir at the end of Frankfurt-Strasse. A new cistern, in the basement of an existing industrial building, controls the water flow; excess water is directed towards Merian Gardens, flowing into the Birs river. The pool is carved in the ground; long retaining walls draw a descending topography, where landscape is first hidden and then slowly revealed when a wall folds. In the absence of water, it becomes a space reminiscent of a theatre, where the window is the sky, and the city is forgotten. Walking up the bridge-aqueduct, the city becomes visible again.

The project is an archipelago of public spaces. It is a system of islands that establishes a new spatial configuration of the landscape, acting in time. The Island of Klybeck re-emerges from the excavation of the filled embankment, creating a park. Nostalgia does not dig out the gravel but the need for a public park which reorientates a new relation to the bathing river. The transformation of the area is carried out as a continuous process: from the establishment of initial favourable conditions by the construction of a structural topographical system, to its gradual shaping by the river flow, with a system of pilings to trap the sediments, favouring the natural growth of the island and creating a riparian ecosystem in a spontaneous process, guided by time. The materials excavated are also reused in a system of public topographies that will articulate the ground floors of the new buildings in the harbour docks, constituting a built archipelago with public and transparent ground floors.

Die Intervention fügt sich in den Kontext des Parco Agricolo Sud in Mailand ein, entlang der Achse der Porta Vigentina. Das Projekt befindet sich in der Nähe des IEO, des Europäischen Instituts für Onkologie, und dient der Erforschung von Behandlungsmethoden mit Heilkräutern für Krebspatienten. Das Projekt ist in drei Makrozonen unterteilt: Die erste befindet sich im Norden, wo vertikale Gewächshäuser in fünf bestehenden Türmen errichtet werden. Die Idee besteht darin, das Skelett der Türme, die inzwischen aufgegeben wurden, wiederherzustellen und für den vertikalen Anbau zu nutzen. Ein zweiter Bereich, der sich weiter südlich befindet, ist die Gestaltung der Gewächshäusern, in denen Heilkräuter angebaut werden. Neben den Gewächshäusern befinden sich die Phyto-Reinigungsbecken, die in Richtung Süden verlaufen und zu dem Becken führen, in dem das gereinigte Wasser zur Wiederverwendung aufgefangen wird. Im dritten Bereich, befindet sich vor dem großen Becken das Hauptgebäude, in dem die Verarbeitung der Heilkräuter zu Fertigprodukten stattfindet.

Le site d’implantation du projet se trouve dans le sud-ouest de la ville de Milan dans le dépôt de tram de ‘’Baggio’’. Il s’agit d’un bâtiment relativement vieux, construit dans les années 1930. Sa fonction actuelle est d’offrir un toit et du repos au tram pendant la nuit. Cependant, des trams plus anciens sont moins utilisés et plus souvent stationnés dans le dépôt.

Dans la ville de Milan en Lombardie, plus de mille espèces de fleurs risquent de disparaître. La Eden line est une serre dans un dépôt de tram. Elle insuffle de la vie dans un monde mécanique et permet aux anciens trams de voyager a nouveaux en tant que vecteurs de propagation du pollen des fleurs voie d’extinction. Pour accommoder ces deux mondes, voici les changements effectués. En dehors du bâtiment, les alentours ouest et nord du dépôt deviennent des espaces verts ou les fleurs peuvent s’épanouir. Les façades borgnes et austères, bordant les zones fleuries, se changent en ‘’vitrine’’ du dépôt de tram pour les passants. 

It was the year 1926 when in the pages of the magazine "Il Secolo" one read about the Albergo Diurno Venezia as a second center of Milan: an Art Nouveau-style space - located under Piazza Oberdan and designed by architect Pietro Portaluppi - dedicated to wellness and body care. It was in this place that the traveler, getting off the train, had a way to take a shower, wash his coalstained clothes, fix his beard and hair, and purchase any effects of personal use. The Albergo Diurno Venezia was, therefore, not just a place for "bathing": its beauty and centrality made it a new meeting place for the city of Milan. Despite the restoration work that has taken place over the years, today the site is, unfortunately, closed and abandoned.

The project aims to restore the original function of the place, thanks to a long underground spa space characterized - as it was in the Diurno - by a central void and an occupied perimeter. Thus was born a place of light, well-being and, above all, contemplation. A laterally illuminated water space, whose mouths of light, in the square above, are transformed into sculptural elements that punctuate with small supporting functions an ideal urban space.

Today, the soil is adapting to movement, which translates into the laws of topography, gives rise to a vector soil, a soil that appears immune to these laws because it experiences minimal resistance to matter, thanks to corridors of movement such as roads, tunnels, and bridges. However, it wasn't always this way; during the city's expansion process, it encountered a complex system of agricultural and industrial remnants. What remains of these residual spaces that have lost their original function in this world of vector spaces? All the signs we observe in the landscape correspond to the actions through which communities appropriate places. Can the memory imprinted in the soil be the guiding trace for a new relationship with the city's territory? We question the ongoing processes that are modifying our urban landscape.