#group11

Here are some tips for a happy teenage life 

1. Know yourself well. Know your best coping strategies to handle your emotions. 

2. Explore freely. Some things might really hurt you but remember that the things that hurt you badly will be the greatest teachers of your life. 

3. Do not invest too much on people. Not all people deserves the same energy. Focus on yourself. 

4. Change your mindset. Set goals for yourself and make the most out of your teenage life. 

FS20, Arena, Landscape Choreography, by Group 11

Where the city meets wilderness: This cliché’d description could be an attempt to describe the Schiessanlage Albisgütli. In reality the wilderness is barely wild anymore and the vibrant city has morphed into low density family dwellings. Far from wild, cultivation seems to be ubiquitous. Allotment gardens are meticulously taken care of, Christmas tree plantations and wood stacks occupy the edge of the forest. Even the site we were given has been modified into a terraced landscape with a beautiful surrealist touch. What seemed to be intact nature at first glimpse revealed itself to be a very pragmatic and calculated landscape at man’s service. Looking at the whole of Friesenberg you can recognize a fragmented cluster of small urban interiors. Parks of ensemble blocks, private gardens of family homes and allotment gardens.  What these spaces share is their likeness of paradise. Paradise not only in a biblical way or as a place of self-fulfillment, but paradise in its very literal meaning which is „walled garden“ in ancient Persian. A fence makes the difference between public space and private spaces over which you can have a glimpse at the owners interpretation of paradise.

As a walled garden, paradise is not only an irretrievable lost condition of a harmonious nature, but also a model that permits man to claim land. In architecture, the enclosure and the wall are at the root of many origin myths. On the other side there is Jørn Utzon. In his his essay „Platforms and plateaus“ he argues that the first architectural gesture was the flattening of the ground, in order to create a space for rituals. These two archetypes of land use reoccur in Friesenberg in the enclosure of the allotment garden and the flattening of the ground for leisure activities like the Schiessanlage or a tennis field. Looking at stadiums you can also recognize these two forms. One one hand the stadium that encloses a space and creates a void or interior entirely different from the world outside like the Plaza de Toros de Acho in Lima Peru and on the other hand stadiums that create a difference between inside and outside through groundworks and platforms like the Monte Alban.

Our Arena is a landscape sculpture that tells this story of the two archetypes and what they mean today at the edge of the city. Asking the question of how the landscape is changed on one side through ideals of the garden and on the other side through cultivation and programmatic use. In its pure form its straight axis that leads through, in the first part, a walled garden filled with themes of paradise like beauty, desire, harmony, ideals and unreachable alienness and in contrast the second part a platform that stages the existing manmade landscape.

Once a year in spring our landscape turns into a stage for the dance piece „Le sacré du printemps“ by Igor Stravinsky, an expressionistic dance piece about the pagan worship of a godlike nature. The visitors walk along the axis which crosses a set of scenes with different atmospheres. According to the dichotomy of wall and platform, city and forest, and finally the bipartite dance, the axis is divided into two parts: The first is a walled garden which one crosses on an existing earth wall, and the second part, which is organized as a series of platforms and stairs which offer views into the existing landscape. At the start of the axis is a cone that gives access to the earth wall. At the end, there is a tribune with the same form, from which one can watch the „grande finale“.

As a park open to the public, the garden is accessible throughout the year. It can be walked through on less rigid paths than the axis, so one can discover the full richness of the scenes. Local plants change with the seasons, there is blossom in spring and fruit in autumn, and unlike in paradise, you are allowed to eat them. Animals will start to feel at home in these diverse, extensively managed habitats and further enrich the experience of visiting the garden. The paradisiac condition of all animals living with humans in a garden becomes a reality again.

FS20, Arena, Landscape Choreography, by Group 11

When Stravinsky wrote „The Rites of Spring“, environmentalism was not even near to being invented. More than hundred years later, the expressionistic dance piece about the pagan worship of a godlike nature is of a bizarre relevance. A global spring before a long lasting summer seems to approach rapidly, and the question of bringing sacrifices to nature is being discussed again, even though not in such a drastic way. Our dance stadium is arranged according to the narrative of this dance piece which has become a modern classic. On an urban scale, we pick up the theme of the enclosed space, which is a recurring theme in Friesenberg. The allotment gardens just like the single-family dwellings are private spaces, which are enclosed in order to realize ones version of a paradise, a better world. With our project, we try to introduce the enclosure on a different scale: Enclosing an area where another housing complex could easily be realized, we decided to isolate it from the ever-changing city as well as from the programmatically heavily urbanized forest.

FS20, Arena, Landscape Choreography, by Group 11

When Stravinsky wrote „The Rites of Spring“, environmentalism was not even near to being invented. More than hundred years later, the expressionistic dance piece about the pagan worship of a godlike nature is of a bizarre relevance. A global spring before a long lasting summer seems to approach rapidly, and the question of bringing sacrifices to nature is being discussed again, even though not in such a drastic way.

Our dance stadium is arranged according to the narrative of this dance piece which has become a modern classic. On an urban scale, we pick up the theme of the enclosed space, which is a recurring theme in Friesenberg. The allotment gardens just like the single-family dwellings are private spaces, which can only be seen passing by, but very cautiously taken care of. We want to reproduce this feeling of peeping into similar spaces, walking along a road, so that the theatre of life which takes place in the allotment gardens can be transformed into a real dance theatre, and the street can become the tribune of this spectacle.

In order to create this effect, we introduce an axis which crosses the site in a straight line, and serves as a materialized timeline. By making a very simple path, the visitors can focus entirely on the performance. To either side of the axis, the sceneries are arranged in a chronological order. Parallel to the axis, the scenes are split again into foreground, middleground and background. These stripes guarantee a continuity in space, e.g. the background of one scene can blend softly into the next one, while the foreground changes more abruptly.

The axis is located on the existing earth wall. It can change according to the scenes that are taking place next to it and vary in height, broadness and degree of openness towards the scene. The foreground frames the view and acts as window for the spectator. It is the place where spectator and dancer can meet each other and interact. The dance mostly takes place in the middleground, which is close to the spectators and characterizes the scene. The background shields the whole scene from the enironment or blends in with it, but can at the same time be a secondary part of the stage.

FS20, Arena, Landscape Choreography, by Group 11 „The Garden, as Paradise, is an ideal and impossible condition, a representation of the entirety of Creation. The reality of nature is turbulent and violent, a never-ending cycle of birth, life and survival, and death, yet Nature as it is idealised and represented in the Garden is benign, beautiful, bountiful, boundless, and out of time: a perfect condition that has been lost and is certainly irretrievable. By invoking the Garden as a theme, architecture is invested with the role of recovering this condition, which is achieved by creating an interior that is complete in itself, distinct and protected from the hostile world without: an ideal or idyll that is fabricated, contained, controlled, and, in its entirety, a representation or a dream.“ - Mark Pimlott

The belief of a self-regulatory, harmonic nature, which Mark Pimlott points out is at the root of garden design, has caused a lot of trouble in the last 200 years. With climate change and the loss of biodiversity we are confronted with ourselves being part of a whole system we interact with. Thinking of nature as an entity apart of the human realm has permitted us to change it in the most drastic ways, destabilising fragile ecosystems and creating new ones in close interaction with humans.Nowadays, the lost condition isn’t the biblical paradise, but the condition of untouched nature. We have rationalised, distorted or modified almost every square meter of our planet, but still want to spend our holidays trekking in the authentic untouched jungle. We ignore the exciting man-made landscape which is just at our doorstep.

By assuming that we have changed nature so drastically that it is hardly recognisable anymore, we can start looking at what we do have: The shooting range is a fantastic place, with discoveries just waiting to be made. Trying to simulate untouched nature in a garden doesn’t make sense anymore. But the newly found, „touched“ nature is so fascinating, that we don’t want to compete it, but rather create a contrast, which helps to highlight the absurdity of the situation. By collaging the layout of a traditional walled Persian garden on our site, we try to trace paradise back to its roots. „Paradise“ has its etymological roots in the proto-Iranian „parādaiĵah“, signifying „walled enclosure“.

This really stripped down paradise ought to show the illusion of any kind of paradise, be it the biblical or untouched nature. It is something that only works inside of walls. Our project has two layers: Paradise, the enclosed garden, and the existing landscape, within which it is situated. Paradise takes its place amongst other curiosities humanity has invented: Shooting ranges and dog schools.

To stage the contrast between those two conditions and thus stimulating reflections about the relationship between human and nature, we chose a dance theatre which will lead the spectator through the landscape. Igor Strawinsky’s „Le Sacre du Printemps“ (The Rite of Spring) is devided into two acts L'Adoration de la Terre (Adoration of the Earth) which will take place in paradisiac landscape and Le Sacrifice (The Sacrifice) which is staged in the existing landscape. As Architects of Paradise we design our Garden as „an interior that is complete in itself, distinct and protected from the hostile world without: an ideal or idyll that is fabricated, contained, controlled, and, in its entirety, a representation or a dream“. An Interior which contains different atmospheres out of our dreams. Lavender fields of the Provence, Citrus trees from Andalusia, Olive trees from Liguria but also Permaculture Elements like regional Fruit trees, flowerbeds for bees, dry and wet zones to create micro and macro ecosystems and thus biodiversity.

FS20, Arena, Landscape Choreography, by Group 11

On the edge of the city, one can still expect wilderness. This is especially true for the Albisgüetli. At the final station of the tram line 13, one can step out into a wilderness which is man-made, driven by functional or economic requirements. A christmas tree nursery with grid layout, stacks of neatly piled up wood, drains to avoid swampy meadows, earth walls as backstops: These elements are speaking so offensively of their use, that it seems as if they wanted to scream at anyone who had the audacity to admire the scenery for its aesthetic value. As it is difficult to stop the landscape from convincing you that its appearance is the result of pure pragmatism, we knew that we could not simply extend it in a similar fashion and doing it justice.

Beside its charming nonchalance, we also found truly beautiful and subtle moments, colourful flowers blooming between the young firs, a lone blackthorn in full blossom or gently rising hills. It was hard sometimes to believe these different aspects where so close to each other and our image of the place transformed more and more into that of a surrealist collage.

Most interesting for us was how the landscape did not offer purely picturesque moments but a richness of situations that provoke being experienced with the body. Spaces open up behind others like secret chambers and ask to be explored, behind every earth wall lurks another surprising situation. With these realizations made, the idea to make an arena for dance came about all by itself. But how does a arena for dance look like? The first clear intention was to design a landscape which inspires for gathering and movement. Thinking of a dance arena for contemporary dance, we decided to turn the whole landscape into a scenery, which dance ensembles could interact with.

As nearly everything we knew about contemporary dance came from the 2011 Wim Wenders film „Pina“, we decided that we would just check whether it could be re-enacted on the site. Having made a catalogue of existing elements, we also made a catalogue of spaces shown in the film, the difference between both would be the modifications we propose in our design.

With the relationship between body and ground as starting point of our examination, we thought about the different surfaces that we found: From meadow to woodchips, the site was offering a lot. In terms of obstacles the dancers could work on, the site was almost abundant, but sometimes not specific enough. Therefore our interventions aim to clarify and give different atmospheres to these obstacles. Moving between these newly created spaces, the dancers will be followed by the spectators which can freely group around the performance, but are occasionally offered possibilities for seating.

To test the interventions, we merged the different scenes into a choreography which would go through the landscape. Starting from a field with blank earth enclosed by bushes one goes through an elevated alley. Small bumps appear, a big earth wall brings the horizon within close proximity. Ascending terraces offer a dramatic perspective, which is intensified by the space becoming more narrow towards the top. The big aim structure of the shooting range is extended with a wooden platform, the backstop serves as tribune to watch the dance. In the middle of the Föhreneggbach, a platform of stone is inserted. When water is flowing, it looks like a big mirror for the sky. Existing wood stacks are doubled, empty stacks make an enfilade towards a clearing which is cut into the forest.

Most of the changes can be made by earthwork and planting trees. When adding structures, we use raw materials like oak wood and limestone. The idea is to make small interventions wherever there is potential in an existing element for the wanted scenery. Which also is our Energy approach. Local Materials, as little earth shifting as possible and when we do, we use the excavation for another intervention. In our energy drawing we compare the CO2 emissions from the building process with the CO2 storage of the planted trees. Not to build is the best way of reducing emissions. Instead of building an arena, we propose taking seriously what has been built. Like reducing emissions and being careful with resources is a challenge to all of us, the already built can also be seen as a productive obstacle. Obstacles that we can dance with.