An architecture of the Stranger: Memory, Identity and the practice of belonging.

I often wonder what another architecture could look like.
I wonder what it would mean, if the oldest treatises we study centered Egypt, not Rome.

If someone like Vitruvius was Black,

or if Palladio was a woman.

What if the pillars of modernism did not bind the discipline to industry, and what if the analogies of the analogues actually represented material reality?

I wonder: what if the „image“ created by the generation afterwards used its influence to empower instead of succumbing to commodification?

„Whatever happened to the analogues?“ has been asked before.

The image is dead, long live the image.

The truth is that the history of the column we so arduously study originated in Africa. Vitruvius could as easily have been non-Italian, Palladio learned his craft during the reign of a Black Florentine prince, Michelangelo was gay and a few years before Aldo Rossi released L’Architettura della Città, Vincent O. Carter published his Bildungsroman ‚The Bern Book‘, a diary of a Black man living in Bern during the 1950s.

So what is this architecture of the city? Who is it for, and who is it by?

Whose power does it overrepresent and perpetuate, and whose does it undermine and subjugate—their lives deemed uncanonizable, barred from architectural representation?

I wonder, wonder about an-other and a-multiplicity.

Wonder about the misunderstanding and misuse of complexity and the instrumentalization of ambiguity.

And wondering turns to wandering.
And wandering turns to seeking.
And I find myself in the city, looking at that architecture of that city.

I see buildings, I see forms.

I see order, I see ambivalence.

I see heritage, I see tradition.

And I see pride, I see wealth.

But I also see privilege.

I see power, represented.

Influence, stuccoed.

Space, claimed.

Dominance, asserted.

I see community, exclusion

and riches, exploited.

What I do not see, is me.

But I know, and I feel, and I strive.
So I wonder on and wander forward, I seek and I look and I try to study those tools harder, those tools that are said to give meaning to a cities form.
And now I start to understand this architecture of this city, and now I can read it.

Now I know;

what this door means, for whom it opens,

what that column holds, and what it suppresses,

what that bay window sees, whom it watches.

But I also gain certainty in one thing more:

I am a stranger in this city, but so are you.

And my-your-our strangeness is what allows us to read.

And because I am this stranger, I see an image of another architecture.

And I begin to think. Think about other such people like me, other strangers.

Lee Scratch Perry or James Baldwin, whose essay has given this project so much, least of all its title.

Like the millions of other strangers, other Black people,
living, existing, suffering,
thriving in Switzerland and Europe—

Black bodies on a seemingly white continent, their belonging unsure.

From here but unwelcome.

What would an architecture look like that didn’t reject this reality—a reality, their reality?

We strangers see this world through a veil,
see what we see at least twofold,
inhabiting multiple psychological realms,
realms plagued by a double consciousness.

Seeing ourselves not just as how we are, but as how we are seen through the eyes of others:

how good sees bad,
how right sees wrong,
how white sees Black.

And so whilst wondering and wandering, I stumble across old houses with mysterious symbols.

Proud houses - stone, glass, timber.

Unyielding ground floors and obscured upper levels, the dense narrow roads around orchestrating a perspective of ornate ceilings.

The houses I see are guildhouses.

Old networks, old kinships, even older family names and power.
They were the ones that gave the canton its shape and our parliament its form.
They laid the foundations for the financial hub Zürich has become, and it is still they who profit the most from it.
So I wander on and find out more.

Everyone I ask about them knows something, but not too much
knows someone, but not really.
And everywhere I look, their trace is to be found.

And then whilst wandering and wondering, I realize that perhaps it is precisely in these rooms,
in these floors,
in these buildings that are seemingly cemented in the collective memory of Zürich,
that a discussion on belonging should take place.

That these rooms, still glowing with the sheen of past power and creaking with future potential, could maybe grasp this condition,

this fugitive uncertainty,

this Blackness of belonging.

So it is precisely this contradiction—a patriarchal, powerful, and hegemonic archipelago of power, and the stranger’s yearning for conviviality—that gives this project its drive.

How can a stranger‘s existence, their parallel identities and myriad origins, collapse into an architecture?

How can Afropean narratives,

Switzerland and Nigeria,
Zürich and Benin,

merge into a formal language aspiring for fluency in both origins?
Aspiring for a claim to subjectivity and identity?

How can belonging become formal, and how can its practice begin to sublate the crisis of the definition of European self-identity?
How can a guildhouse make space for a stranger in the city?

During this year’s Sechseläuten, two breaks in tradition give rise to potential.
First, their snowman could not be burnt on schedule, leaving the fate of summer undetermined till a later date.

Second, a new guild was formed.
A guild that claimed it is open for all those who want to be a part of it,
a guild that thinks about exactly the same questions I had been asking myself on my many wanderings—a guild for diversity.

It is for them that I built a guildhouse, a possible catalyst for a season of change in the guild city of Zürich.

So placed on the Limmat, between the Rathaus and Wasserkirche, and in front of the Haus zum Rüden, the guildhouse of the most important guild,
this new guildhouse is situated as much within time as exempt from it, thriving in an ambivalence of multiple analogies.

Taking the name Zum Schiff, the building’s spatiality and expression are conceived to convey the urgency of belonging.

Is it a half-timbered building, or is it a bridge?
Is it a pier, or is it a cruise terminal?

Is it from the future, or is it from the past?

Does it await something, or has that ship already sailed? And if so, who are the aliens that it left?

Two cast iron columns stand in the middle of the river;
another one stands slightly closer to the shore.
Between them spans a steel structure over which is laid a tablecloth, or a carpet, or a quilt of black marble.
Clinging to the edges rises a timber structure, it itself not quite willing to expose the logic of its tectonics, continually questioning the hierarchies given in the system it finds itself in:
questioning its context, its construction, its belonging.

Like an exoskeleton, it holds something unholdable inside itself. What is supposed to be infill does not accept this singular reading—does not consent to being a single being.

Pulsating with the tension of the gaze, this building announces urgency;
it communicates necessity.
Its blackness, its softness, its quiet torment plays tricks on the eye.

What is normally hidden quills out, seeps soft tactility.
A black canvas, one that is not blank but is also not yet filled.

A textile, its threads woven but its motif not yet embroidered.
Black as an announcement but also as an invitation.
Black as a space of potentiality and possibility, not just a site of trauma.
Black as a locus for memory, a space in which layers collapse into each other whilst retaining their distinctivity.
Black as volume, not void.
Black as architecture, not burden.

But it is distanced from the shore. It leans into its own contradictions, at once shielding itself and inviting you to reckon with it.
But caution, do not mistake this invitation as surrender.
This blackness speaks, and it says:

Don’t you fucking dare touch my hair.

The building is approached from the shore, and quilling from its opening, at the end of the bridge, stands a blinding whiteness—
a tiled stove that refuses the intent of its namesake,
a mass that rises from cast iron and turns into porcelain.
Moving from its designation as the hearth, from the center into the world,
molding space into an entrance or an exit, or both.
What was once the highest degree of representation and the signifier of Wohlstand reinvents itself.

Its ends are made of older tiled stoves taken—
ones that once demarcated Zürich as a guild city—but creating the new space between are other tiles,
tiles that evoke relief plaques from Benin, stretching, stitching, and weaving.
And pressed into these tiles, or pressing out from beneath them, through the stove, are saints, the patron saints of Zürich: Felix, Regula, and Exuperantius.

Not looking at you but turned, turned as if moving already,
looking to the next step or the last.
Holding their heads or holding all they’ve carried—displaced, on the move, but still here.
They are strangers,
North African saints killled and turned martyrs in Zürich,
glazed on black porcelain, with blackness pushing through where the white glaze wears thin.

They are here,

insisting,
pressing,
refusing to sit quiet,
their screams of ceramic reverberating through the hall:

Felix und Regula sind wir—Felix und Regula sind wir.

And what follows behind is a plan of three spatial layers perpendicular to the river: a hall on the pier, a portego, a pier nobile, a high room that spans both facades,

structured and scaled by the stove and the candelabra— all elements of domesticity or publicness,

all in a play, in dialogue,
thriving in ambiguity and alive with multiplicity.

And almost hidden, revealed either only from afar or from within or in section, the hall holds above it a library,
like an impluvium cascading down,
both distant and present, enclosed and exposed,
a space alive with the tensions of memory, exclusion, and the desire to be remembered.

The books do not just speak to you—they are turned inward and demand a different kind of listening.
A library to challenge, to prod at the edges of what is visible and what is silenced,
its very existence interrogating the space it occupies—asking who is allowed to look in and who is kept out, a gesture of resistance.

And much like the ripples of a dropped pebble, or the waves of something larger, the new house Zum Schiff pulsates outward into the city, the first waves of which meet the Haus zum Rüden.
Where once this so old and historical building stood in water,
where the river used to flow, now rises a column.

A dense and strange anchor set hard against the facade of the old guildhouse.

Something that doesn’t quite belong but has always been here, long before anyone chose to see it, heavy in the architecture of a place that has forgotten, or ignored, its own histories of the sea.

Zürich is landlocked, yes, but this column pulls an economy of Blackness, of strange(r)ness, into the city’s self-enclosed borders.

It’s linked,
held,
moored to histories of water, of trade, of the movements of people—Black people, bodies, and goods.

Of violence made invisible, but always present.
Making the guildhouses seem a bit fragile, as if they’re propped up by this foreign element, this totemic interruption that reminds us that this old city is not as local as it thinks,
that its guilded economy was always part of a broader network.
It marks the contradiction between a past rooted in labor and craft and a present drowning in finance, where class is restructured and abstracted,
where bodies still labor but elsewhere,
out of sight.

It sits beneath a new bay window like a held breath, holding up and holding back, making the city look at itself,
look up,
look down,
look outward,
look inward.

Now these rooms of power, they reach out.
The bay windows shift, drop, bending the whole scene toward the street, the ground, where the city moves.
Now tethered to the city floor, and through its weight refusing to let the city forget its history of distance, its economies of elsewhere.

But the windows still open. They lower the gaze, force a shift, an outreach.

The ground floor follows suit.
A hidden, forgotten Gothic portal on the north facade is revealed, changing the building’s orientation, giving the building a site of entrance and the city a site of addressability—aligning it to its history of water.
Where once the arcade space stood, a new layer of glass, almost vitrines, makes space for a table.
A table that aims to bring down all that has been stored in the rooms above for years, hidden and stained in the paneling.

Now reminiscent, in scale and fitting, of the hall of the house Zum Schiff, the table hosts part of what I propose a new guild system could be:
a changing program, a changing exhibition, starting today and ending next year on Sechseläuten.

A discussion on race, on belonging, and on tradition.

‚Double patina, Afropasts, and Afrofutures.‘

A series of events curated so as to show the diversity of a doubly conscious state,
of a world seen through a veil,
of an Afropean state of presence and an Afropean architecture.

To show that there is such a thing as an architecture of the stranger.

That Nigeria can merge with Switzerland.

That a half-timbered house can talk about race

and

a guildhouse can facilitate belonging.

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