Stadtwald Zurich

Once a hinterland to Zurich, the wooded hilltops have been engulfed by development. These green archipelagoes, now charged with leisure facilities and urban infrastructure, form a new common ground to the cities parallel valleys. The Stadtwald as an urban park eludes current legal description and reorientates the city towards a central public space.

“Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect” wrote Venturi and Scott-Brown in Learning From Las Vegas in 1972. The sentiment is even more important in today´s discourse on the urban periphery. What were once dissociated patches of urban fringe are now central due to their new role as part of the continuous border towards the Stadtwald. Conditions that repeat themselves typologically display the different dimensions of this boundary, which undulates from narrow strips to vast open landscapes. Where streets run alongside the forest, public access is infrequent and forest growth acts as an aggressor to infrastructure. A new park wall of mixed use development spatializes the boundary and presents a new urban facade towards the Stadtwald. The extension of the graveyards further into the forest expands the contemplative atmosphere of the institutions that profit most from their proximity. The reorganisation of allotment parcels into communal gardens create formal entrances to the park whilst responding to the trend moving from self-sufficiency to communal horticulture. By shifting municipal farmland to communally run farms, and replacing less fruitful patches of land with sporting facilities and instructional gardens, a greenspace is generated that accommodates both the protection of a landform and a range of recreational uses. In a final step of synthesis avenues connect the two parallel cities in the Limmat and Glatt valley, whilst providing a hierarchy in a myriad of disorientating forest paths. ´Nature´ is protected by federal law, so in order to alleviate problems concerning peripheral development, we found that it is not the law that needed evading, but the term ´nature´ that needed redefining. Ecology is a concept that wholly includes human activity, preferably when sustainable. So in this new ecology the city that formerly could only offer a sparse 8 m2 of green space to each citizen, can now take full advantage of the 57 m2 of new park the forests reserve for each inhabitant.