Hosoya Schaefer Architects

Automobile braucht diese Stadt keine – sie ist selbst bereits eine perfekte Maschine. Alle Möglichkeiten des zeitgenössischen Städtebaus werden hier ausgereizt, faszinierend als Gedankenexperiment und technisch durchaus vor stellbar. Aber kann man denn Städte einfach so komplett neu erfinden? Es ist gar nicht so einfach, zu definieren, was eine Stadt ausmacht. Einfacher ist es, zu beschreiben, was sie nicht ist...

Für Markus Schaefer und Hiromi Hosoya ist Architektur mehr als nur Gebäude und gutes Design. Die beiden sind die Gründer des Architektur- und Stadtforschungs­büros Hosoya Schaefer Architects in Zürich. Nach außen hin erwecken sie Projekte zum Leben, hinter den Kulissen beschäftigen sie sich mit komplexen Fragen rund um den urbanen Raum: Was macht Städte langfristig intelligent, nachhaltig und erfüllend?

Cities have always been places where commerce and production, working and living are physically and functionally integrated. Only with the rise of industry have zoning regulations been introduced to separate these functions in space. But what is the role of such regulations when industry is digitized, increasingly emission-free, and based on innovation more than mass production? How should working and living be combined, when mobility and energy consumption become more sustainable? And what are the opportunities in a volatile world, characterized by digital disruption, migration, and demographic shifts, to create urban areas based on social equity and resilience?

Based on interrogative research at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in the interdisciplinary urban design studio The Industrious City, the Zurich-based architecture studio Hosoya Schaefer presents this publication of the same name. Investigating ways in which production can be reintroduced to the city, this book explores how new synergies between production, services, leisure and living can be found in the context of the polycentric urban landscape of Switzerland – all against the backdrop of fundamental shifts in how urban industry is shaping our social, political, spatial and economic futures.

Photographs by Iwan Baan, Géraldine Recker, Jos Schmid, Joël Tettamanti

Essays by Philipp Aerni, Alex Krieger, Nina Rappaport, Markus Schaefer, Anna Schindler, Daniel Wiener, Barbara Zeleny, Gesa Ziemer

Conversations with Johannes Eisenhut, Hans Hess, Linda Grieder, Danny Riedel, Thomas Schmid, Mike Guyer, Momoyo Kaijima, Reinhard Flückiger, Marloes Fischer, Patrick Griss, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler, Kim Stanley Robinson

Including Swiss Cases and Scenarios prepared by Sarah Asseel

The Elbbruckenquartier is the last of the HafenCity's ten quarters. It completes the district to the east as its second urban centre after the Oberseequartier. The subway and commuter train station Elbbrücken link it to Hamburg and further south to Wilhelmsburg. 21.4 hectares and over half a million square meters floor area provide an urban mixed use, 1,400 apartments and approximately 11,000 jobs. The site is an unlikely place for such a dense urban development (FAR > 3.8)...

“Switzerland – Deep Urbanism for an Age of Disruption” has been published by Strelka Press, with a foreword by Anastassia Smirnova. The book builds on a course taught in the Advanced Urban Design program at the National Research University & Strelka Institute in Moscow. It describes the role of urbanism in Switzerland, following our National Exposition project. It uses this starting point to sketch a theory of “Deep Urbanism”, a complex systems approach to what cities are and how they interact with a territory, illustrated with the very specific case of Switzerland.

“We perceive urbanity as space, but we live it as interaction. Cities are catalysts for such interactions, stabilizing our relationships through infrastructures and institutions, spaces and stories. Technological progress increases the network depth and speed of interactions, which in turn fuels innovation and progress. The result is self-reinforcing growth and, globally, the ever more-rapid transformation of nature into culture with all the risks this entails. Cities are not static and autonomous. Cities have depth.

This essay, therefore, does not frame the discipline of urbanism as just a design profession that deals with urban spaces and building typologies, and sometimes with history, laws, regulations or land economy. Rather, it proposes a complex system science which I call “Deep Urbanism” and which I define as the discipline of the relationships – the connections and connectedness – that generate a complex system of people and their material, technological and symbolic culture acting on a territory with its specific emergent dynamics and externalities.”