Monsterpieces 2 - Messe Basel

The Seminar MONSTERPIECES is a playful architectural speculation about the re-use potential of large under-used buildings, intending to increase its impact on the immediate surroundings without significant transformations. 

As a pedagogical and design methodology, the students retraced how the building design was conceived through the production of 3d models that focus on the inherent spatial challenges and opportunities of each “Monster.”
These detailed geometrical models were then used first as a virtual tool in a broader discussion on re-use and later as the base for the representation of its speculated future.

Purposefully optimistic and densely detailed illustrations wish to capture more than an act of simple re-programming. We emphasize the interventions on the representation of possible new ways of inhabiting a given built structure.
How does the new program impact the base morphology of the building, and how does it re-shape its interaction with the city?

In the book “Once upon a time… Monsterpieces of the 2000s!”, Aude-Line Duliere and Clara Wong take upon several iconic buildings produced during the beginning of the century and reprogram them through a series of intentional “look-alike children collages.” Despite their naive appearance, these graphic speculations become the trigger for a more significant discussion on the nature of the “monsters” within the architectural production beyond the timeframe established by the title.
In “Monster, Frontiers, and Interiority,” Antoine Picon defines that the “architectural monsters are better understood as-built situations than constructions answering programs and fulfilling functions. This shift is related to another property of monsters – namely, the fact that they often have a problematic interiority. With their discrepant parts, borrowed from different genres and species, monsters are difficult to understand from an anatomical and physiological standpoint.”
The book and the work of Aude-Line Dulière and Clara Wong are an inspiration to our Seminar, and we use the name „Monsterpieces“ as reverence and credit. However, the subject and perspective of our approach are quite different.

We do not focus on „star architecture“ and its deliberate strangeness to context. We are interested in all kinds of buildings that underperform within their context and interior spatial potential. Our MONSTERS are rather odd uncles than scary freaks or black sheep. The acknowledgment of their re-use’s urgency is the starting point for speculation upon facts and fictions, past and future, ecology and sustainability, and how they converge in unexpected ways.

Guest Reviewers:

Aude-Line Dulière (Architectural Association), Georg Vrachliotis (TU Delft), Leonid Slonimsky (KOSMOS Architects), Madeleine Kessler (Unscene Architecture)

Students:

Elena Mayer, Fabrizio Canessa, Andrea Santos, Nicolas Bär, Nils Bachert, Felix Booz, Ines Sophie Schäfer, Britta Stumpf, Laurin Harter, Lama Alkadi, Arthur Banni, Anna Klotzki

Professorship Bauplanung und Entwerfen:

Prof. Simon Hartmann, Scientific Assistant Mariana Santana