Mario Kündig

Switzerland – a country made of 26 smaller countries in a trench coat. What holds it all together is not our democracy, or our shared love of money, but rather our endless appetite for infrastructure. No tunnel is too long, no bridge too high, no dam too heavy to be drilled, hammered, and poured into our landscape. The people are determined to subdue the very nature that has brought them fame and wealth. The by now not-so- infra-structure has become a core aspect of Swiss culture, it is at the constant interchange of economic developments, political decisions, and popular votes. Our resources are as endless as our ambitions and combined with the need for endless economic growth the grace us with projects like the Autobahn-Y, a midcentury plan of connecting 3 major highways in the middle of Zurich. Started but never finished, it has had a lasting impact on the city, burdening it with traffic it could never handle. At Letten, where the highways would have met, the Milchbucktunnel and its subsequent gallery still cut the city in half.

This project reflects on possible futures of structures so large they cannot be dismantled but whose current use is intrinsically inefficient and bordering obsolescence. We should never let a good crisis go to waste. These spaces were not conceived to be inhabited by humans directly, so how can we adapt them? If one frees themselves of the conventions of what a “good space” is, the possibilities seem endless. So far away from the surface, the pressure to fit into the city alleviates, uses and functions like nightclubs, workshops, repair shops, gyms, swim halls, theaters, garages, art production, bartering, trading etc. find the place that Zurich does not offer anymore. The design tries to weave the structure back into the city by cutting it open, by tearing down walls, by creating new accesses. The tunnel is filled with new (infra)structures that make it appropriable, such as water, electricity, access, partitions etc. The car is replaced by the human body in the pursuit of self-expression; the tunnel challenges the visitor to live up to its scale and to search for new freedoms.