werk, bauen + wohnen 11-2025 Worth a detour

Worth a detour

Worth a detour, — for Rem Koolhaas in 1991 this was an apt description of the Furka Pass, as we read in his brick-thick cult book S, M, L, XL. This mountain pass was where Koolhaas, the architect who shaped the 1990s like hardly any other, realized his only building in Switzerland. Often closed following the era of the Furkart project and under a blanket of snow for half the year, it no longer seemed completely clear whether this spatial intervention in the Hotel Furkablick had ever been made. It appears that with the passage of time other examples of architecture from the 1990s have been forgotten, too. This may be because they do not form part of a star architect’s oeuvre or because, in terms of time, they are now in a blind spot between the present and history. In this issue we see them as worth a detour. We travel back to the Nineties looking for the big themes that characterized this decade in Switzerland.

In his introductory essay Ursprung says that this country slept through the beginning of the decade (p. 6). Despite the fact that at this time the world was being reorganized. East and West were no longer separated by the Iron Curtain, yet somehow the Europe euphoria never reached Switzerland. The globalization train departed without Switzerland on board. A recession afflicted the country, something that greatly affected architects, too. Little was built, public commissions were rare. The young generation established minimalism with small projects in the regions (p. 10). With their ETH diplomas in their pockets, some moved to other European countries, as history was being written in exciting cities like Berlin or Barcelona (p. 35).

But Switzerland’s urban landscape was also undergoing an epochal upheaval: huge industrial sites in city cores were shut down. Structural change did more than just shape the nature of the services society. Through the temporary use of factory sites, it created open spaces and inspired ideas about the post-industrial city (p. 18). The peripheries of urbanized Switzerland were a further area of activity: Heinrich Helfenstein reflected their qualities in impressive series of photographs (p. 28). His view triggered the important spatial examination of the agglomeration that continues to inform the discourse today. — Lucia Gratz