The old town in the alpine region as new model for communal sufficiency
Supervisors: Conradin Clavuot & Peter Staub
Assistant: Robert Mair
This semester, Studio Clavuot & Staub explores the theme „sufficiency“ from a communal and from an individual’s point of view. We ask ourselves what parameters are key to a sufficient future urban life by venturing into a historic context: the (medieval) old town. While often being abandoned due to lack of attractiveness the compact and sometimes contained old town offers a promising ground for investigation as an alternative to urban sprawl and the contemporary trend of importing modern, suburban living qualities (for example more space, personal mobility, surrounded by green space) into city centers.
By analysing and searching for the outstanding qualities of three different historic city centers in our vicinity (Chur, Feldkirch and Rapperswil) we aim to identify new models of social coexistence that support a future, sufficient lifestyle. Starting by exploring sufficiency from a point of view of the minimal, the necessary we then aim to identify innovative mobility concepts, new forms of working and living and a healthy balance between communal and individual demands. The findings will be transformed into architectural proposals – buildings ‐ that respect their immediate historic context while acting as a forward thinking, visionary manifest on sufficiency.
For us, sufficiency can be achieved by thinking long term and beyond one individual’s perspective. This means we are concerned with the overall well‐being of a community. As a result, our interventions – just like the structures of the old towns within which we are working ‐ will be meant to last and provide spatial qualities that offer more than their programmatic definition suggests.
How can architecture support communities to desire and develop a sufficient lifestyle?
