Seminar 3

Do we have to find a new name for emptiness?
How should we “clad” it?
Vegetation?
Dung or Design?
What would Goethe think of a tractor?
Why did planning abandon the agricultural land?
Sampled from “Countryside: The Future” (2020) by Rem Koolhaas

We approach the urban transformation of the Sarneraatal with a distinct interest for the unbuilt, namely the vast areas of agriculture. Coined as a non-building zone, the agriculture zone (Landwirtschaftszone LwZ) appears as the counterpart to the built area – colored in innocent green in the land-use plan.

But the seaming opposition is misleading: The dichotomy of city and landscape has long vanished and what used to be nature or cultivated land outside the city is now a totally fabricated and controlled space of industrial agriculture, infrastructure and risk management, forming an urbanized landscape. In fact, the urban sprawl – the chaotic growth of the built – is urbanistically less problematic than the increasingly spoiled landscape as a residue.

Paradoxically, the mental projection on the agricultural landscape as a green, ecological sphere remains – even if landscape architects argue that biodiversity is higher within urban settlements than in the context of fields, due to large-scale monoculture and overfertilization. The lack of buildings in the countryside does not correlate with a lack of human impact.

Yet, the Kuhweide or cow pasture is the holy grail of the image of pre-alpine Switzerland. In this spirit, the common goal of urbanization is still to consolidate the built area and favor compact settlements – reproducing a blind-spot on agriculture and the in-between.

Concentrating the projected growth of inhabitants in the Sarneraatal in the plane between Sarnen and Alpnach an inbetween the two lakes, we speculate on alternative scenarios of an urbanized cultivated landscape.

We challenge the trivialization of agriculture in the context of urbanization and shift the focus on the fringes of the green parts of the land-use plan. Here, along the edge of agriculture various forms of human activity collide: Living, production, leisure, service activities, care, recreation, taming nature, biodiversity enhancement…

Turning the void into the object of interest, students will investigate on the specific qualities of the agricultural area between Sarnen and Alpnach and its relation to the urban transformation. In groups of four to five, you  will choose on urban and infrastructural elements of the area – village centers, the two airports, the cantonal street, the hydraulic structures and riverscapes, the railway, dispersed settlements and business parks – and make it resonate with the adjacent agricultural area. You will produce short documentary videos as project trailers including site footage and interviews.

The seminar seeks an alternative relation of agricultural and urban landscape and wonders what is the nature of this city?