The Judson Dance Theatre, active in 1960s New York, engaged with everyday movements and found objects beyond their conventional meanings and functions. Their openness to engage with any given thing allowed for new ways of reading and perceiving them. This attitude can be applied to situations in which the value of something has the potential to transcend its initial purpose. Set within the periphery, such conditions can be found in abundance, where many buildings and materials have become redundant. When ETH Studio Basel classified parts of ‘Glarus Süd’ as “fallow”, the term was met with confusion. The study reflects an urban perspective that evaluates territories according to their capacity to serve the urban condition From this viewpoint, the municipality appears stagnant, evident in the failure to adopt a strategic plan since 2014 and in contrast to the suburban growth of northern Glarus. Yet this apparent lack of prospects also enables a shift in perspective: away from technocratic urban logic, toward a positioning from within the periphery.
Repository
The project approaches Glarus Süd through an engagement with its specificities. Observations are gathered in a repository containing archive documents, conversations, photographs, building applications, notations and literature. Arranged into constellations, these materials reveal overlapping narratives, based on associated metadata for each item. By continously expanding the repository, it becomes both documentative and speculative. Through four themes, various conditions for intervention are abstracted.
Sufficient
In Schwanden, a former fire station accommodates a plumbing workshop following its relocation due to a landslide. Instead of the planned extensive renovation and demolition, the project asks what is necessary. Existing structures are minimally adapted, pursuing adequacy and durability: the hose tower becomes a circulation space with a platform lift, the staircase is reconfigured, and the roof internally insulated.
Folly
A folly addresses the erasure of Hätzingen’s demolished upper factory as a likely future scenario for many industrial sites in the valley. The project imagines the site as an active material storage where rubble, metal sheets, timber and excavated stone appear in changing constellations shaped by local demolition, construction and forestry activities.
Picturesque
The Cotlan factory in Rüti takes an ambivalent position: ISOS protected, yet disliked for its ‘ugly’ appearance. Through the ‘picturesque’, the project questions aesthetic preconceptions and accepts natural, industrial and urban elements as part of the lived landscape. A new path establishes alternative views onto the complex, while ornament derived from the ‘Freulerpalast’ is applied to the contested 1970s facade.
Utilitarian
In Linthal, the factory complex will soon be transformed and partially demolished. The project proposes a utilitarian approach combining pragmatism with qualitative measures, maintaining most of the existing purposes: Windows are reintroduced into a saw tooth roof, the Ringspinnerei is being extended vertically for housing with salvaged domestic interior elements.
Perspective
The project follows a pluralistic process, grounded in negotiation and engagement, acknowledging complexity as the determining framework. Rather than being concerned with ultimate problem solving, it regards the project as evolving situation, provoking conditions for ongoing negotiation. As William Carlos Williams writes, ‘Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?’