For almost two months, in May and June 2017, admission to the Swiss Museum of Architecture (SAM) in Basel was free. Its halls, usually chamber and deanery, turned almost into a street space, access to which was open to everyone: the Forum Basel exhibition was going on.
“It was an exhibition dedicated to public space and the city of Basel as a testing ground where we can test new technologies and new ideas. Its final part coincided with the Art Basel fair. In part, the theme of the exhibition and the idea of making the entrance to the museum free were born as a reaction to the hyper-commercialization of the city during the days of Art Basel,”says Leonid Slonimsky, partner of the KOSMOS bureau.
So if Art Basel is about contemporary art as it was presented in the 20th century, then Forum Basel is a postcard from a future in which there are no national borders, artists exhibit their paintings on Instagram, and instead of banknotes they use bitcoins.
So, the new director of SAM, Andreas Ruby, invited not the famous Swiss architects to rethink the traditional public spaces of the city, but the young bureaus - the Chilean
Plan Comun and KOSMOS. They could be called foreign, but Berliner Andreas Ruby defined the co-curators as temporary locals - temporarily local. In addition, Leonid Slonimsky and Artem Kitaev have lived and worked in Basel for over four years - enough to understand the context and study the details. By the way, the director of the museum learned about the Russian-Swiss-American bureau "KOSMOS" from social networks.
The architects of the KOSMOS bureau, together with co-curators and the directorate, proposed, in the words of Leonid Slonimsky, “to give the museum to people”. All four SAM rooms were turned into public spaces: in one, visitors played ping-pong, the other was a coworking space, the third was a reading room where you could sit on the podium of old newspapers and magazines (they were collected on Facebook), and in the fourth they showed a video -interviews of architects and urbanists about the structure of cities. To breathe even more street life into the museum premises, gypsy street musicians were invited to the opening.
There were many visitors, and from the outside, the sudden revival in SAM could seem like a performance. However, the “street” part was only a form for a discussion about rethinking public spaces, which, in another expression, would be boring just enough to arouse the interest of specialists, but scare away those for whom these spaces are intended.
COSMOS carried out a study of the urban life of Basel, its public rituals and some buildings, on the basis of which they created their concepts of public spaces, which were exhibited along with projects of invited Swiss bureaus - Vécsey & Schmidt, Caesar Zumthor, Manuel Herz, Focketyn del Rio Studio, Rahbaran Hürzeler and Scheibler & Villard.
Drawings and axonometrics, hung on the walls around the tennis table, at which the game was in full swing, set the accents in the name of the exhibition: in Forum Basel, the word "forum" is not an event, but a space, akin to a Roman forum, open and lively.
“According to our plan, a terrace was to appear on the roof of the museum, where there were chairs with tables, and people could go out there to breathe, chat and sit in the shade of the trees. We even built a staircase to reach it, - says Leonid Slonimsky. "But the simple idea - to put chairs on the roof and open access - was overgrown with a huge amount of bureaucracy, and as a result, due to regulations and restrictions, it was completely banned." The architects left the tables and chairs on the roof, and turned the terrace, which was not accidental, but beckoning visitors, into an installation with the title “No Access”.
KOSMOS: Six projects for Basel
Hidden garden
Underground park project
The architects proposed to turn the old tunnel through which the Birzig River flows into an underground botanical garden. It could serve both as a place for romantic walks and as a transit route for pedestrians in the rain. The microclimate in it is maintained thanks to lamps, hydroponics and heaters.
Art drop
Water art gallery project
The concept combines two of Basel's most important tourist symbols - the Rhine and the Art Basel exhibition. On the floating platform, it will be possible to organize exhibitions, lectures and celebrations. It will move along the river only thanks to the current, like traditional Basel ferries.
Thermae Urbano
Urban spa concept
COSMOS proposed to heat the water in the fountain next to the cathedral on Münsterplatz in the cold season in order to turn it into a public bath: a mix of antiquity, Christian tradition and the famous Basel fountains.
Triangle Unbound
Project manifesto for the area around Dreilenderek
A concept that “does not require architectural intervention”. The area around Dreilenderek, a monument on the Rhine that symbolizes the crossing of the state borders of Germany, France and Switzerland, receives the status of extraterritorial and leaves the area of state laws with all the ensuing consequences.
De-fence
Office area transformation plan
The closed campus of the Novartis concern is proposed to be partially converted into a public space and open to all comers outside of working hours and on Sundays. At this time, the massive fence of the territory will turn into a canopy.
Discharge Schedule
Urban leisure calendar
By analogy with the official Swiss Abfuhrplan, a brochure that describes in detail the process of collecting and recycling waste, the architects came up with their own alternative version: they collected and described how to spend time in the city - with and without adventures.
