Kiosk in Bürkliplatz Zürich
2022competition
Zürich
The new kiosk of Bürkliplatz is envisioned as a mediating element between the city and the waterfront.
Its ambition is to operate as a device to protect and serve the market square from noisy traffic lanes while generating a scenography to walk towards and from the waterfront and its view, holding a surprise on both of its sides.
To do so, instead of an object, the building is thought of as a simple and direct act of urban landscape that refers to the entire lake despite its tiny dimensions: a wall. This primordial element is the essence of the urban intervention and generates its main spatial possibilities.
Eventually, cellular elements attach to it, responding to the programmatic choreography by which the kiosk effectively works. Like the rib of a tree leaf, the rammed earth wall is a statical structural backbone as well as a cavity for all the infrastructural network of pipes and electrical connections to serve the kiosk and market activities.
Through openings of different characters, each area of the building seeks to establish a visual or physical relation with peculiar moments of both Bürkliplatz and the waterfront, engaging actively with existing features of the site: flowerbeds, Maillard music pavilion, water, and mountains. The rigorous articulation of the wall refers to the severe facade of the nearby SNB bank building, as much as the treatment of a mineral construction material emphasizes its foundational nature - it belongs to the ground.
Additional thin steel roofs are hanging from the latter, and respond diversely to the ever-changing conditions that unfold daily around the area: their articulation is more ephemeral and shares the formal language of old metal steamboats - they belong to the lake memory.
