ZAZ Bellerive – Zentrum Architektur Zürich
Opened in 2017, the Zurich Architecture Centre in Villa Bellerive on Lake Zurich has become an important venue for discussion and knowledge dissemination. The Department of Architecture is one of four founding members of the centre, enabling it to reach a wider audience beyond the university for exciting projects. The Chair of Sociology participates in various exhibitions and events. Christian Schmid has been on the board of the centre since its inception.
After Zurich: Controversies about the city – an anarchive
This exhibition highlighted five milestones in urban development that have sparked debate, controversy and conflict and continue to shape Zurich’s image today. The exhibition thus also served as a starting point for discussing pressing current issues.
(I) The urbanistic reorientation of the growing industrial city from the river to the lake began in 1882 with the construction of the lakeside parks, which remain Zurich’s most important meeting place and open space to this day. (II) In the midst of the First World War, Zurich began planning a ‘Greater Zurich’, which was realised from the 1920s to the 1950s by ‘Red Zurich’ with garden city-style cooperative housing developments. To this day, these settlements form an indispensable stock of good and affordable housing. (III) Unfinished modernity: In the 1950s and 1960s, urban design meant above all traffic planning. The Y‑Expressway right through the innercity , tangents, an underground railway and a major CBD-expansion around Langstrasse were planned, fiercely opposed and often rejected at the ballot box. (IV) During the 1970s, the saved inner-city block-edge neighbourhoods along Langstrasse were rediscovered as places of urbanity, but were soon threatened again by redevelopment measures and gentrification. This part of the exhibition was contributed by the Chair of Sociology. (V) The opening of the Zurich S‑Bahn in 1990 turned Zurich into a region that expanded into today’s metropolitan area with advancing large-scale urbanisation.
Urban spaces
This exhibition presented four different contemporary approaches to urbanity:
(1) Photographer and artist Meret Wandeler showed how the reflections of ground floor office windows change urban space by projecting the city’s architecture onto itself. (2) Urban researcher Nitin Bathla displayed a carpet in which textile workers living in a dense settlement on the outskirts of Delhi depict their own situation. (3) The architecture collective 8000.Agency presented finds from the demolition of the 43-year-old Wydäckerring settlement in Zurich, which fell victim to the financialisation of the real estate sector, and showed what could have been created from this settlement instead. This exhibition was developed from an independent master’s thesis at ETH Zurich. (4) Filmmaker Thomas Imbach presented ‘Nemesis’, a film installation about the demolition of Zurich’s unique freight train station, which was demolished to make way for the construction of the huge Zurich Police and Justice Centre (PJZ).
The Paris Commune of 1871
Two events were dedicated to the famous Paris Commune.
In the spring of 1871, Paris experienced an upheaval that would reverberate for a long time to come – and inspire most revolutionary activists of the time and many later ones. In his book “La proclamation de la Commune”, Henri Lefebvre even described it as an urban revolution. The event “Urban Struggles” asked what remains of this revolution 150 years later, and urban researcher Klaus Ronneberger, co-editor of the German translation of Lefebvre’s book, discussed the historical background of the Commune.
