Caruso St John Architects

2007
Location: Zurich, Switzerland
Client: Stadt Zurich
Project Status: Ongoing Project

In this public art project organised by the city of Zürich, Caruso St John collaborated with the artist Thomas Demand. The project is located at Escher Wyss Platz, where a road viaduct traverses a major city junction in an unusually wild urban situation for Zürich. The platz is in Zürich West, a formerly industrial area of the city undergoing transformation with new cultural institutions and new inhabitants. The project is to be carried out in parallel with improvements to road and tram infrastructures at the viaduct.

The design places two structures under the viaduct, which appear almost as archaeological fragments from the street that stood there previously. The image for these buildings refers to the ‘Stubborn Nail’, a briefly infamous situation in China where private owners held out against all odds in their small house while developers demolished the city around them. In this case the newly-added structures introduce a more complex dynamic to the situation, engaging with the urban street edge opposite, the space under the viaduct and the high level road.

The structures contain a restaurant and a kiosk. They will be constructed of painted prefabricated timber inside and out, giving the construction an abstract quality and avoiding any sense of ‘hand crafting’, a process with some parallels to Thomas Demand’s studio practice.