I recently visted Luzern, in Switzerland, for a workshop at thethe oldest art and design school in Switzerland, Hochschule Luzern.
My host, Andy Polaine had asked me to set students in the first semester of the MA Design a challenge.
The task I gave them was as follows: find a neglected asset somewhere in Luzern, and design a service to increase its value to the city.
As the workshop began, I assumed that some groups of students would focus on the city’s new cultural centre [photo above]. Designed by Jean Novel, the building had taken twenty years to conceive and plan. With an overhanging roof 35m 100 feet) above the ground, the building had cost the city 130 million euros to build.
This was an iconic building with a capital “I”. I thought it must surely have potential as the focus of some new kind of civic activity.
But then a strange thing happened. When I asked the students what they thought of their new centre, they pronounced it to be “quite nice” – and hastened on to tell me stories about other features of the city that they had found more engaging to work with.
The first joint winner was called ‘Straight way to heaven’.
The team had identified a church as their neglected asset,and proposed to increase its value as a meeting place by opening it up to bouldering in the city.
The group did not expect the church authorities to be thrilled by their idea, but our jury found their service communication to be so engaging that they were made joint winners.
The second winning project in Luzern, Graveyard Alive, was especially enchanting. The group had discovered that the city’s Friedhof Cemetary contained a lot of as-yet-unused space.
They came up with a sublime closed-loop service concept: offer people the opportunity to donate their bodies, once buried, as nutrients to save endangered plants and cultivate biodiversity.
The group had already talked with workers in the graveyard [in favour] and identified a leading Swiss seed bank ProSpecieRara to provide the seeds.
The next step is to sign up the first customers….
Bouldering in the City/Straight Way to Heaven was the work of: Christoph Gabathuler, Myriam Gämperli, Erika Frankhauser Schürch and Antonio Russo
Graveyard Alive was the work of: Nadine Bucher, Anete Melece and Dominik Büeler
Second menu
Unplugged, but not alone
I was snooty in suggesting, in my comment on Doug Rushkoff’s new book, that he should get out of the city more.
But if I’m an armchair tree-hugger, Stephanie Smith is the real thing.
Two months ago, this former architect abandoned her Los Angeles life for a new one in her shack in Joshua Tree, Southern California. The story of what happened next is reported in her Unplugged diary.
Smith’s homesteader cabin sits on a five acre parcel “across the road from the house she just gave back to the bank”.
One reason I’m gripped by Unplugged Diary is that my daughter Kate and I visited the area a couple of years back. It was a three hour drive from downtown LA – and we made the whole trip using these directions, made for us by Stephanie, which I keep proudly on my office wall here in France:
That trip was also memorable because I was fined $350 by a huge and terrifying local cop for overtaking a school bus on this otherwise empty road to Stephanie’s shack: