Prelude
Prelude
2024 Wallenberg Award First Prize for student design excellence with Mason Magemeneas
$14,000 Prize
In 1985, a fire broke out at a chemical storehouse at Schweizerhalle, an industrial area near Basel, Switzerland. The fire destroyed the entire storehouse, and released more than a thousand tons of chemicals. The water used to combat the fire swept thousands of liters of highly toxic pesticides and deadly mercury into the Rhine River, turning the water red and killing nearly all plant and animal life downstream.
The Film
The Film
This short film documents the year to year life of the school, representing a hectic beginning and students learning how to exist within a de-institutionalized ecology. They find themselves eating on moss tables, participating in structural symphonies, and engaging in design experiments that give way to holistic, horizontal thinking towards the environment with themselves a key part.
Instances
Instances
Axonometric drawings represent the spilling over of the school’s practice and ideology. The introduction of “Post Office” seeks to precede the commercial development of the Dreispitz district with the pollination of a new school of thought - in this case, the rejection of nature versus culture opposition leads to various connected events and modifications to the car park and its surroundings.
A series of happenings, drawn through fragmented instances, represent the expanding shuffle of the school - where students find themselves working on, with, around, and through the building to reimagine their educational agency. The squirrels very much enjoy the new music.
“Post Office” advocates for architecture that engages directly with environmental challenges, moving beyond aesthetics to confront realities like heat, greenhouse gases, and colonial impacts. Rejecting the glorification of architectural form, it promotes a raw exploration of environmental effects on our bodies and surroundings, advocating for a collapse of the nature-culture divide as a foundational educational step.