The prevailing architecture of exaggerated verticalization driven by the real estate market has transfigured blameless, traditional neighbourhoods into arrays of isolated privately owned buildings of extreme luxury that deny both the street and the city. Where Fifth Avenue passes alongside Central Park its real estate market value rises immeasurably. This is exactly where one of the best known cultural Institutions, the Goethe Institute, has its North American headquarters. Nonetheless, this six-storey, turn-of- the-century townhouse facing the Metropolitan Museum of Art has stood empty for almost ten years. 

Our Studio will reanimate this address with a public and cultural agenda and will reintroduce new typologies for a public building. It will reconsider the culture of congestion as the origin of a typology that is nowadays only abused by a monofunctional plot for the happy few.

Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio Winter term program 2017-18

Prof. Piet Eckert
Prof. Wim Eckert
with
Michelle Badrutt
Andrea Faraguna