Der Bestand als Ressource

What is important in your thinking and designing?

Sujets Objets oscillates between the contradictory properties of antonyms. Between the practice of observing the qualities of what is present – a landscape, a site, a construction, a material — and altering them, intervening, transforming, subtracting, multiplying. Between accepting and questioning the value of an elliptical system, while examining the possibility of a plural understanding of the word value. Between the horizontal distribution of quality and the verticality of an economy of means. Between the freedom of indecisive, evolving spaces and the specificity of a detail, a texture or a proportion. Between the radicality of a collective and the sensibility of an individual. Our creative process initiates from the existing. Viewed as a resource rather than a limit or an excuse, reality becomes an opportunity for the development of architectural narratives. On the surface of encounter between the aforementioned antonyms, our projects are situated somewhere near the intersection of cartesian objective reality and lightness of subjectivity.

How does this materialise in the chosen project?

The project transforms a 19th century villa into collective cooperative housing. The introverted nature of the building is contrasted by its position inside the limits of the public Park Geisendorf in Geneva. As such, the villa becomes a floating object of protected individuality, whose primary connection to the city is made through its technical infrastructure, connecting a room to the house, to the neighbourhood, to the public sphere. The project concentrates its resources on the intersection of two interventions: the installation of technical networks, and the surfaces upon which those are installed, the walls, the ceilings, and the floors. Pipes, radiators and electricity ducts acquire an autonomous expression, revealing the presence of their network and relating the existing to the new. Their technical nature is installed on top of surfaces of subjective experimentation, whose details of colour, quality of paint and existing patterns assume the lightness of superficiality as the major architectural intervention.