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KOSMOS Creates 6 Speculative Public Space Interventions for Basel

Emerging international architecture office KOSMOS has unveiled 6 projects exploring potential collective spaces in the city of Basel, Switzerland. Unveiled during Art Basel, the speculative projects were featured in the Forum Basel exhibition curated alongside Museum Director Andreas Ruby and Stéphanie Savio, and emerging Chilean practice Plan Común. Held at the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM), the architecture exhibition was held “in reaction to the increasing commodification of urban space today” and dedicated itself to investigating new possibilities for public space in Basel. Check out the projects, with descriptions from KOSMOS, below.

Think You Know Swiss Architecture? Think Again.

In one of his 1922 travel essays for the Toronto Star Ernest Hemingway wrote, in a typically thewy tone, of “a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways and all stuck over with large brown hotels built [in] the cuckoo style of architecture.” This was his Switzerland: a country cornered in the heartland of Europe and yet distant from so much of its history. A nation which, for better or worse and particularly over the course of the 20th Century, has cultivated and become subject to a singularly one-dimensional reputation when it comes to architectural culture and the built environment.

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This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes—beginning in the 1950s—that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to re-conceive space in response to the conditions of a newly affluent society and the emergence of the electronic age.

Each of these investigations—from Le Corbusier’s late new harmony of form, to Aldo Rossi’s evocations of the force of history—looks into the basic elements, open futures and varied possibilities of architectural thinking, proposing fundamental new ideas and examining the potential of the built environment to reform the relations of humans to each other and to their environments.