© KOSMOS
Emerging international architecture office KOSMOS has unveiled 6 projects exploring potential collective spaces in the city of Basel, Switzerland. Unveiled during Art Basel, the speculative projects were featured in the Forum Basel exhibition curated alongside Museum Director Andreas Ruby and emerging Chilean practice Plan Común. Held at the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM), the architecture exhibition was held “in reaction to the increasing commodification of urban space today” and dedicated itself to investigating new possibilities for public space in Basel. Check out the projects, with descriptions from KOSMOS, below.
The more heterogeneous societies become, the more important it is for cities to provide open spaces where we can experience ourselves as part of a community. In the original sense of the ‘Museion’ of Ancient Greece, S AM Swiss Architecture Museum is transformed into a home for public life.
Project #1: Hidden Garden
New use of Birsig underground river: botanical park. Image © KOSMOS
Location: Gross Basel
Project: Underground park
Area: 2000 square meters
The project turns Basel’s underground river, Birsig, into a botanical garden, hidden underground, but open for public. Lights, hydroponic technology and heaters transform the tunnel’s contained microclimate into warm and humid space. The Hidden Park will serve as a place for romantic walking, botanical explorations or transit on a rainy day.
Diverse botanical conditions in contained environment.. Image © KOSMOS
“Uncovered” axonometry: underground park in the city. Image © KOSMOS
Project #2: Art Drop
Floating art gallery: both infrastructure and public space. Image © KOSMOS
Location: Rhine River
Project: Floating Art Gallery
Area: 50 square meters
The beautiful Rhine and famous Art Basel are important Basel city landmarks. The “Art Drop” project combines these two main attractions together. It is a new initiative, which proposes to create a multifunctional floating platform, using the existing technology of traditional Basel Ferries, moved solely by the current of the river.
Performance on the river. Image © KOSMOS
Potential use of the Aer Drop ferry. Image © KOSMOS
Project #3: Thermae Urbano
View of Thermae Urbano on cold autumn day.. Image © KOSMOS
Location: Münsterplatz
Project: Urban Spa
Area: 20 square meters
The winter urban spa, “Thermae Urbano,” takes the idea from traditional Basel fountains and proposes to heat up water inside the historical fountain on Münsterplatz in winter, to transform it into a space for winter bathing. Steam above the square, half-naked bodies in a warm common ritual with amazing winter settings…
Urban spa in the fountain in winter. Image © KOSMOS
View of Munsterplatz, location of Thermae Urbano Project. Image © KOSMOS
Project #4: Triangle Unbound
Deregulated corner between three countries. Image © KOSMOS
Location: Dreilandereck
Project: Deregulated Zone
Area: 1000 square meters
The “Unbound Triangle” project gives ‘Dreilandereck’ – the corner between France, Germany, and Switzerland, a status of exterritoriality and lifts the regulations. Social processes are encouraged, shadowy processes are not prohibited. This speculative project does not propose an architectural intervention but a protocol of deregulation.
Boundaries of the “Triangle Unbound”. Image © KOSMOS
Project #5: De-Fence!
De-fenced corporate campus, allowing people in (off the working hours).. Image © KOSMOS
Location: Novartis Campus
Project: New Regime of Use
Area: 0.2 square kilometers
A new regime of use of public space in the city’s corporate territories. The territory of Novartis Campus opens to the public outside of office working hours: after 7 PM daily and on Sundays. We propose to redesign the fence of the campus into a transformable wall serving as a separator during working hours and as a continuous canopy outside working hours.
Campus during working hours: closed. Image © KOSMOS
Campus outside of working hours: open. Image © KOSMOS
Project #6: Discharge Calendar
© KOSMOS
Project: Guerilla Calendar
An Invented Protocol for deregulating life in a Swiss city. Analogous to official Swiss Abfuhrplan – a calendar, which meticulously describes the process of recycling and trash collection, we propose a Non-Official Discharge Schedule – an alternative calendar, giving to the citizens’ ideas of where to spend good time for free, where to find urban adventures or semi-legal stuff.
Guerilla Calendar. Image © KOSMOS
Information Courtesy of KOSMOS
Think You Know Swiss Architecture? Think Again.
In one of his 1922 travel essays for the Toronto Star Ernest Hemingway wrote, in a typically thewy tone, of “a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways and all stuck over with large brown hotels built [in] the cuckoo style of architecture.”