tracks in winter
This series of essays on contemporary and future cityscapes was born out of the Advanced Urban Design international master’s program (AUD), a unique two-year educational collaboration between Strelka Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
In the spirit of the AUD program, which worked first and foremost with transient, unstable environments, the essays of the series look at seldom explored territories and fundamental yet hard-to-capture paradoxes, while constantly questioning the role of design and designers in an age of frightening complexity of both means and ends.
All authors of this series were affiliated with the AUD program between the years of 2016 and 2018, as course curators, invited speakers, advisers, or students. Together they form a rather original group of academics and practitioners who are eager to bind research and design into one consistent praxis.
Working at the frontiers of their respective professional fields—architecture, history, urban design, sociology, curatorship, data analysis, cultural and political studies—the AUD authors pay attention to themes and phenomena that are not yet central to the urban discourse, but may very well become so in the future. They propose new terms, new rhetorical techniques, and new forms of projective explorations with an ambition to act as seismographs for the next tectonic shifts in how we understand and make cities.
It is not very often that practicing architects and urbanists critically reflect upon the prevailing professional order. Their offices, their commissions, and, most importantly, their chances to realize the projects are too dependent on the existing logic of urban development and the current complex protocols. There is usually no energy or time left for risky theoretical pursuits. Those who still dare to embark on a critical journey face a radical challenge: In order to formulate their own position towards today’s praxis in our overly-connected world they have to zoom out and assess their design endeavors within a much larger context. With the ongoing globalization process and multiplying planetary concerns, any inquiry into the nature of a design profession becomes almost by definition an investigation far beyond the scale and scope of a particular operation. Such broad perspective requires education, knowledge, courage, and a very specific type of curiosity—that of a critical thinker and multidisciplinary explorer.
Markus Schaefer—a Swiss architect and urbanist, who after graduating as a neurobiologist from the University of Zurich and as an architect from the Harvard School of Design started his career directing a think-tank at the office of Rem Koolhaas—is not only up to the challenge, but can do much more. In his essay for the AUD series, he exploits a rhetorical figure that allows him to use his own country, Switzerland, as a model for a particular type of holistic urbanism, defined by both topography and topology. In Schaefer’s case, the word model is cleverly used in two senses—as a physical representation of an idea and as a possible example to follow.
Switzerland is a conceptual dream that has been realized in part due to geographical and historical circumstances, but first and foremost by conscious and robust design efforts. The country’s journey in search of identity unfolds in the essay as a consistent quest for reconciliation of traditional dichotomies between rural and urban, state and community, culture and nature. Alternating between the excursus on Confoederatio Helvetica as an amazing political, cultural, and geological system, and a critical account of his office’s winning proposal for the national Expo 2027, Schaefer builds an argument for a multidimensional approach to design which he calls “deep urbanism.” That’s not to say that every country should become “like Switzerland,” but in its current state of resilient and complex equilibrium, the author believes the country could give us an idea about productive urban environments of the future and what kind of practice will be needed to operate within them effectively.
Anastassia Smirnova,
AUD program curator
Project team X27
Hosoya Schaefer
Architects, Studio Vulkan,
Plinio Bachmann with
KEEAS, Emch+Berger,
Integral Ruedi Baur,
Bartholet Maschinenbau.