In 1336, amidst the flames of rebellion set by himself, Rudolf Brun, with the help of worker associations, overthrew the ruling elite and installed himself as the city’s first mayor. In one move, not only did he eliminate his political opposition and empower himself; he ‘uplifted’ the workers associations to the name we know them by today, the guilds of Zürich. Embedding them into the political fabric to such a degree that their legacy is still an integral part of the city of Zürich, the Guilds have continued to represent one of the driving political, financial and cultural forces of the city for over 650 years. As in many other European cities, the guilds monopolized production of their respective professions and came to hold considerable influence over the development of business and trade. Hailing originally from ‘noble’ causes, the institution of the guilds was created to protect trade secrets specific to their professions, ensure quality in the commodities they produced, and offer services now provided by the state. After the revolution of 1336, the guild network in Zürich became much more than an association protecting profession secrets; it became a mechanism for political governance as the members of the respective guilds formed a majority in the cities‘ parliament, setting the guild system in Zürich apart from almost every other guild system worldwide. As an originally medieval structure entwined with the politics of the city, their position in society led them to considerable power, to profiting from colonial and imperial exploits around the world, and to becoming amongst the foremost players in the financialization of the globalized world. These intricate and resilient networks of power have steered the development of Zürich for over 650 years, shaping its built reality. The old part of the city is inconceivable without them, their guild houses forming a veritable archipelago of power.
This diploma aims to analyse these Guilds and their Guild houses.
As a fluid network of kinship and influence, their networks offer themselves as a highly suitable case study to analyse the condition and production of labour and the flows of capital throughout Zürich’s history; be they inter/ national in scale, or financial/social in character. Their houses and the manifold other ways, such as Sechseläuten, through which they have left their imprint on the built fabric, allow these networks of capital-extraction and influence to be traced through clear, formal elements. Working with not only their architectural heritage, but also their historical, political and financial legacy, this diploma aims to develop visions that capitalize upon these various forms of accumulated capital, proposing not only alternate forms of reading the past, but also alternate visions for constructing the future.
starting point.
The European city, and the idea of the nation state, hangs in a precarious balance. Ecological disasters, financial and social inequalities and heightened social tensions to name but a few are known to be the problems of our time - but the roots of these problems lie within the foundation stones of western thought. Imperialist, racist and sexist modes of knowledge production have conditioned a society that lives in obscurity of its ailments. Only by re-framing our perspective can we begin to question the dominant voice that has narrated our collective history. By incorporating into this new vision the voices of those too long unheard, we can begin to suggest inclusive futures and forms of community that can accommodate them. If we as Europeans want to work together to foster optimistic outlooks, and if we as architects aim to integrate these progressive sentiments into our practice, then a rereading and reassessment of our shared history must be made. Change as the only constant in a city becomes the driving force of the project.
‘Stranger in the city’, a body of research and an architectural project, aims to offer itself as an instrument to support this process of historical reckoning - a process synonymous to decolonization.
methodology.
The future of Zürich, as with every other city, cannot be understood without including the perspective of class, gender and race. The guilds of Zürich, through their unique positioning in the city and deep entrenchment in its history, offer themselves as a perfect vessel to not only analyse the cities‘ history, but help guide its futures. The fact that their institutions are almost always reserved for male members, or the repeated accusations of racist and demeaning practices suffice to concur to the hypothesis that the guilds represent an outdated institution representative of the causes of the problems facing the many that constitute a cities population, and are in need of critical questioning. Accepting these apparently contrasting positions creates the field of tension acting as the base for this diploma. ‚Stranger in the city‘ borrows its name from the seminal essay ‚Stranger in the Village‘ by James Baldwin, and inspired by it, aims to gather these narratives, exploring them in their own right, as well as in their juxtaposition to one another and to the guilds - understanding them individually not only in relation to their theoretical relevance but exploring how they will come to condition our understanding of architecture.
To do so, a rhetorical figure as narrator is invoked.
The signifying stranger, the ominous othered Gestalt created in the nightmares of European angst serves as interpreter between a stranger‘s solitude and the collective. The stranger‘s perspective is equipped with the eyes of Baldwin and the souls of many, many other theoreticians, and is employed in this book to provide a certain ‚professional naïveté‘. The strangers position from the outside helps guide us through layers of ideological history, to offer a new perspective, forming a counterweight to these institutions, our city and its historiography, and allowing all our narratives to exist on the same plane. By carrying out a precise, formal reading of the architecture of the guild house and through detailed drawings of these representational spaces, through mapping their presence in the city in terms of their political power and social influence and through mapping the various forms of capital accumulated by these networks, their physical and visible presence becomes overlaid with their invisible influence. By unfolding these spaces of power into the fabric of the city, and by accompanying this act with a precise discourse on understanding subaltern narratives, we allow otherwise unheard perspective’s to exist alongside the mediums of the discipline of architecture. Only through their inclusion, new connections in an otherwise rigid historiography become possible.
The stranger as narrator functions, to a degree, as a mediating agent via which certain boundaries prevalent in the discussion of class, race and gender, are hopefully deconstructed.
objective.
‚Stranger in the City‘ aims to develop a concept structure that facilitates the discussion of class, gender and race as it pertains to the development of cities, and aims to develop a project proposal capable and worthy of implementing and embedding this into the built environment of Zürich. By executing a granular and close reading of the formal characteristics of the guild houses, this diploma aims to understand the development of formal language in the architectural vocabulary in Zürich, using their built heritage as a lens to propose a next step in its development. Furthermore, this diploma aims to analyse, understand and make accessible the breadth of architectural meaning and the meaning and importance of representation linked to these houses. Rather than a complete disregard and dismissal of an outdated institution, this diploma proposes a radical reorganization - an attempt at critically questioning embedded structures to find out ways of working together. ‚Stranger in the city‘ aims to facilitate an understanding of stranger-ness, in an attempt to formally foster belonging.
outcome.
Stranger in the City aims to showcase how the aforementioned narratives of the stranger can begin to articulate an architectural language. From the scale of urban design and its effect to the scale and realm of the interior/domestic, I have sought to demonstrate the legitimacy of a doubly conscious lens in architecture. A myriad field of references serves to condition the reading on a metaphorical and urbanistic scale, while a set of clear formal and symbolic abstractions and experiments helps make these associations more readable at subsequent smaller scales. The fictive exhibition Double Patina: Afropasts and Afrofutures highlights how I imagine a guild infrastructure could become active and productive within the realms of critique I emphasize in the cityscape of Zürich. It explores how a reimagined guild infrastructure could become active and productive within the critical framework of Zürich’s cityscape. It proposes a new programming for the two guild houses—old and new—while amplifying traces of Black presence in Zürich’s recent history.
Referencing past events and exhibitions that centered Black European life—such as Lee Scratch Perry at Cabaret Voltaire or the multiple exhibitions on the Benin bronzes—Double Patina serves as a canvas for exploring and discussing Afropean belonging. A series of curated events showcases the diversity of a doubly conscious state: a world seen through a veil, an Afropean state of presence, and an Afropean architecture. This is the city seen twice, seen through a veil, seen through the ones it did not expect. Stranger in the city turns the guilds inside out, makes a house for the fugitive, makes an architecture of doubling, a black patina on the old stone.
A detailed short essay explaining the project further can be found in the process documentatinon accompanying the second semester.
dont be a stranger - salim@strangerinthecity.ch