Dimitrios Katsis (FS19)

Shopville. You’ve been there a few times too often. And you still can’t orient yourself (and if you can, you are proud of it). Thing is you don’t have to. Upon entering signs assume the task of  carrying you magically along more or less wide corridors and escalators to your destination - outside the station. This mysterious underground space is only meant to be transversed, isn’t it? Yet 11% of the half a million people frequenting the station daily spend there more than 45 minutes. Who are they? More importantly: where are they? At the edges of the corridors shopping, at one of the 156 free or sponsored seats sitting listening to the obligatory common denominator background music, eating at Burger King, or waiting in the waiting room at the intermediate floor if they hold a ticket. A room of 40 square meters seating 14 in a classroom arrangement not unlike a bus.

Right next to it, behind closed doors the baggage has more space. The declining baggage business of the swiss railways has left in the middle of the most frequented space of Switzerland thousands of square meters of underused space, used primarily for storage. Let’s reverse this situation.

For the 3000-5000 people lingering at the station at any given time no single waiting room no matter how big will do. We create 114 rooms to accommodate their diverse interests and individual needs, not least their different taste in music. Urbanity is not about the common denominator; it is about creating boundaries that control and enable relationships, erecting walls and opening doors and windows; a neighborhood of spaces to be appropriated for diverse uses by different users. Shop, meet, work, play, wait. A breaking down of the infrastructure to the human scale.

We compensate the lack of natural context - daylight - by human context, other uses lit at various light levels suggesting that you only are at the back room of a restaurant and daylight is not far away.

We use the quality of disorientation of underground spaces to our advantage. A world to lose yourself exploring, while also finding yourself. Metaphorically and literally: The brightly lit infrastructure spaces bound your space. Aligned door openings loosely define a path connecting the distribution spaces with attached vertical connections to Shopville (level -2) and ground floor, the circulation levels par excellence. We complement these established circulation levels by a level for exploration. In contrast to the lubricated movement through slick corridors and signs of Shopville, we induce friction in the movement to create a sense of place with a different pace.

In a place of signs we signal our presence with architectural signs. Windows overlooking escalators suggest the presence of our world. If (but only if) you have a moment, you will find out how to get there: Double height spaces and staircases of backstage materiality invite you to explore. Spiral staircases within stores of Shopville suggest the existence of a room above (or 114).

We work with the existing, no matter how mundane, but transform it to suggest new readings. The existing way of erecting walls, single layer brick, but with new openings and wooden doors. The existing exposed concrete floors for the main waiting rooms and their connections, but carpet for the rest of the rooms. The available (artificial) light in the service spaces, partially filtered through frosted windows. And last but not least, the existing users of the station, empowered with a choice of paths, pace, and content.