Studio Vulkan

Studio Vulkan is a Zürich based landscape architecture practice. They are not bound to finding a formula for their projects, but rather seem to be more interested in re-questioning everything a project might bring: context, ambience and all available tools for solving problems and making an experience. They are not committed to finding a style, although there is a notion of ‘relaxed aesthetics’ present in most of their projects that is well-anchored in the project narrative.

Toni Areal, for example, is a roof garden, an urban oasis that uses only time to make itself more defined by natural forces, and one in particular – decay. Exposing the beauty of decay, or decay itself, is still a taboo across our profession; oddly enough, in an age when nature is in focus. Similarly, Park Naturmuseum St. Gallen is dealing with ‘artificial naturalness’. It aims to question the occurrence of nature in an entirely artificial/urban context. Studio Vulkan seem to enjoy introducing intentional imperfections, knowing that in this way, their works are far more interesting. For Park Naturmuseum they wrote in the project narrative: “In addition to the predominantly native plants, exotic hydrangeas stand for the paradox of the place.”

In times, when our profession still produces a monoculture of ideas resulting in sameness, Studio Vulkan is showing the way to keep landscape architecture interesting. Their work provokes an endless curiosity while also featuring a catalogue of solutions to a range of relevant issues.

The project is a poetic response to a palimpsest of natural and human-driven processes that shaped the site. One physical corpus was made by two different forces. The narrative states that the general perception of the artificial hill and the surrounding forest is a natural environment. They call it pseudo-nature.
Abstractly, it works because of the contrast between open and closed spaces, namely, an artificial forest with a forest ring and a clearing. The top of the hill is a small circular viewing platform made of polished concrete which references the geological structure of the moraine below the top of the hill. The viewing disc features fog-jets that produce an artificial cloud which acts as a poetic reference to flying, to being in the sky, to touching the sky. Entering the artificial cloud acts as a reference to moving through clouds when travelling by plane.
Beside the forest ring, the remaining forest area appears almost untouched, as it is under a nature conservation plan. Hence, maintenance is used as means of design. The project exposes many contradictions in our understanding of what is natural and what is artificial. It also provides a series of poetic ambiences and playful experiences on the hilltop.

The Park of Encounters is a complex design that deals with the public use of a once-army base. Built by the Nazi regime in 1937 and taken over by Allied forces after the war, Campbell Barracks later served as NATO HQ for Europe, which closed in the mid-2010s. Decades of army use left a palimpsest of traces that were waiting to be reinterpreted.

The jury recognises how difficult and yet successful it was to redesign this army-charged site with ‘respectful lightness’ and a ‘slight twist of humour’ as if the designers wanted to decompress the site and add play in a witty, nearly mischievous way. That is evident, for example, in a stripe of play elements that run through the entrance checkpoint, emphasising its disuse, or colouring and displacing the found artefacts from the 1970s. In a different configuration, stripped of their original use, these artefacts represent the retreat of control, repression and are abstracted into new constellations, provoking new interpretations and ways of interaction.

The jurors appreciated this underlying attitude, also resulting in elegant and much more subtle means of change, for example, mixing and shredding of the existing pavements and using them anew. The material/colour palette is exceptionally well thought-through; it communicates the different layers of the site’s palimpsest and connects different parts into a coherent whole.

Small Steps Toward a Long Park Along the River Major landscape projects, especially those crossing municipal boundaries, no longer emerge from a single grand design. More often, they evolve over generations, gradually transitioning from planning frameworks into tangible realities. The open space concept for Fil Bleu takes a different approach. Through a clear and robust […]

2000-2025: An Interim Report / The Experience of Time Around the turn of the millennium, Zurich was a city in transformation, evolving from a somewhat staid banking city to a hip, booming international centre. The development of the former ABB industrial site into a residential neighbourhood was the first major development for a city that […]

The space beneath the viaduct occupies the geographic center of the new residential and commercial area on the former site of the Zwicky company. Thanks to its direct link to the Neugut tram stop in the north and its connection to the Stettbach train station in the south, it also greatly impacts the image and […]

The newly built Museum of Natural History St. Gallen was conceived of in a triage together with the adjacent Botanical Garden and the church St. Maria Neudorf. The site of the park is exemplary of the Swiss landscape paradox: in this tiny country, infrastructure, city edge conditions and bucolic landscapes are tightly interwoven. Spanned between […]

The park helps to anchor the solitary university building amidst the heterogeneous urban surroundings. In keeping with the master plan, the park acts as a foyer for the Polyfeld – a site for education, research and business – with strategic importance for the district as a whole, while simultaneously serving as a central common area for […]

The City of Uster is surrounded by three distinct landscape typologies, each with its own strong atmosphere and materiality: woodlands, glacial drumlins and lake marshes. For a new path planned by the government encircling the city we were asked to make subtile interventions which provide a landscape experience to the users. Our design proposal uses […]

The new Zurich University of the Arts has been built in the former Toni yogurt factory in Zürich West, an area rapidly being transformed from industrial to post-industrial uses. Thirty metres above ground, the conditions of the project were not easy: the enormous rooftops were to be converted into accessible, green oasis for intensive use […]