28/04/2024
On January 24, the Jacques Herzog und Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Basel hosted ‘Unbuilt Matter’ as part of the current S AM exhibition ‘What If – Unbuilt Architecture in Switzerland’.
Marco Zelli, of the Zurich-based collective Forum for Architecture Theory (F.A.T.), moderated the roundtable discussion with Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou and Jaques Herzog.
The talk explored how the category of the unbuilt applies to architecture and unfolded its spectrum of possibilities, starting from two texts proposed by the speakers.
With the storyboard ‘Life / Supersurface, an alternative model of life on Earth’, Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou offered an insight into the work of Superstudio. The unbuilt is here the premise for radical speculation, where an a priori design strategy informs the entirety of inhabitable space, stretching and dissolving the boundaries of the discipline toward different forms of project.
With the text ‘Eine Stadt im Werden?’ Jaques Herzog praised instead for a dialectic approach where the unbuilt gears to the given, providing a space potential and ‘hesitation’. The assignment for studying the vertical development of the city of Basel has been hijacked by the architects and the artist Rémy Zaugg, to interrogate the physical nature of the city, its infrastructural system, and its geography to formulate possible stories of the city, and multiple conjectures about its ‘becoming’.
While both analyzed positions revealed a certain prophetic capacity, their interplay showed the distance between an eschatological narrative and a negotiation with the here and now, resulting in different use of the unbuilt category.
Photos: Hans H. Münchhalfen
