Newly built quarters of a city always have something alienating. That is normal. Their sudden size seems too big while the trees are still too small. There are no conversions yet, as it would be embarrassing to immediately tear down parts of what has just been built and change them.
Gardens and interiors show the fashion of the year a project was realized. There are no signs of appropriation or weathering and if there are any, they make the newness even more painful. There is nothing sadder than a new building with a crack in one of its windows. It is a sign of the Beginning of the End. This newness confuses and puzzles people –even they may consider it to be desirable just as well. It takes them away from their customary settings. Jacques Tati has demonstrated this masterly in “Playtime” of 1967. Alex van Warmerdam has shown another aspect of alienation in his film ‘De Noorderlingen’ of 1992, showing how the inhabitants of the new villages in the Dutch polders, who usually came from the poor northern part of the Netherlands –Drenthe, Groningen-, continued more secretly archaic aspects of their lifestyle in their new environment –and particularly in the forest adjacent to it. This kind of alienation has always been attributed to Modernist architecture and urbanism. Also Tati and van Warmerdam suggest that it is Modernism that is to blame. Over time, all kinds of aesthetical strategies have been invented and applied to at least partly overcome this alienation or at least soften it, from the attempts to produce a culture specific modern architecture in the nineteen fifties and critical regionalism over postmodernism to straightforward traditionalism or historicism.
Now, when we come to Neu-Oerlikon in Zürich, we are overwhelmed with feelings of alienation as well. For the largest part, they are nothing to worry about. They are unavoidable and will certainly be overcome in the course of time. It is up to the inhabitants to appropriate their quarter and they will – if they may or not. Some of the feelings Neu-Oerlikon evokes remind of the ones that filmmakers like Jacques Tati and Alex Van Warmerdam laid bare. I spotted a lonely woman – a young urban professional obviously - , her high heels going ‘plock-plock’ on the huge empty concrete plaza in front of the ‘Zürich City’ office building that happens to accommodate Price Waterhouse Cooper, a building that with its more than generous use of glass and enormous empty atrium could have been part of the set of Playtime anyway. A man with an impressive large unfinished tribal tattoo on his back was bathing his dog in the carefully designed basin of the Oerliker Park, as if it were a drinking fountain for cattle in a traditional village.

Streets, parks and “Playtime” remembrances
But there is also something about the feelings of alienation Neu-Oerlikon triggers that requires further investigation. In the project, all kinds of aspects dealing with the history and tradition of the site have been taken into account. Some of the original industrial buildings remain – although less than some had maybe hoped for. Few maintain their original use as a factory; some became a new function, like Event 550, a large formal industrial hall, in which all kinds of larger events can take place. The original directions reappear in the plan, the scale of industrial buildings has been more or less maintained and, last but not least, the scale and nature of the public spaces echoes the spaces on an industrial terrain, forming are a more or less continuous surface of asphalt and concrete stretching from façade to façade. Although this produces an incredible clear image of built versus public space, this also produces a general image of emptiness. The strict way by which this principle is handled also causes some problems. There is no hierarchical distinction between front streets and back streets and some apartments are immediately open to the street. They lack any form of privacy; some of those adjacent to Birchstrasse are still not rented out.
The parks are without a doubt the strongest and most interesting feature of Neu-Oerlikon. They do not attempt to present a quasi-nature or an anti-city, but they are all something between a square and a park, as Christoph Wieser has pointed out in werk, bauen+wohnen before.1) Indeed, these parks also play their part in the mediation between history and the contemporary. In the general sobriety and the hard materials there are flirtations with industrial chic; the watchtower in the Oerliker Park reminds of the former chimneys; and the MFO park even takes the form of an overgrown ruin of an industrial building. What is most striking is the emptiness these urban parks present – even if one takes into consideration trees still have to grow and in general the green will become somewhat more lush in the course of time. Pebbles, gravel, stone, concrete, asphalt and wooden decks are the predominant elements that make up the spaces. Maybe it is just because no choice has been made whether these spaces are supposed to be a square or a park that their functioning seems to be problematic. A square is a public space for all, where a park can offer more specific places for specific leisure activities that may answer the needs of a contemporary post-industrial individualized society. The wooden deck in the Oerliker Park, for example, is offered to the inhabitants to program activities. It is clear however, that these activities can only be of a collective nature to occupy the space. Until they take place, this deck just remains a void –which is most of the time. Some parts of the public space offer an occasion for activities, but they remain in traditional categories like sitting on a bench, athletics and soccer. For children there are the traditional swings, climbing racks and sandboxes, organized in a way that reminds of a military training area.
The main function or task of these parks or squares however seems to be to provide an aesthetical identity for the area. At first, one might think the circular pavilion in the Wahlenpark might be there to offer some shade next to a small circular pool, but no: it is just an abstract composition, covered with a mesh. The bare concrete surface around Peter Märkli’s school forms the ideal backdrop for the lonesome bronze nudes that are lying around there. They are displayed quasi casually and do not immediately reveal what they are. Unwilling to immediately admit their place in the history of art somewhere in the tradition of De Chirico or Giacometti, at first they rather look like machine parts that were never removed.

Boxes surrounded by emptiness
The architecture in Neu-Oerlikon expresses a similar emptiness as the public spaces do. In fact, in many cases, it is almost impossible to figure out what functions the buildings one is looking at have. Almost all buildings are the most abstract version of a perimeter block: a box. All have strictly repetitive facades, whether they are closed with glass shutters or punctuated with windows and balconies. Office buildings are tarnished as apartment buildings, Peter Märkli’s school looks like a factory. On the ground floor, we do usually see glass facades, often with restaurants or kitchens behind them. But most of these restaurants are not public and only accessible from the atriums of the buildings. Shops and supermarkets are hidden. Signs seem not to be allowed and are only visible behind the glass entrances. An enormous COOP supermarket and department store is even hidden three stories underground! On the bottom of its atrium some garden furniture is exhibited with signs that say that picnicking is not allowed. As if anyone would just dare to think about it! There seems to be a structural ban on everything that might possibly bring Neu-Oerlikon to life. The most wonderful thing about Swiss architecture always was the marriage between the ideas of Aldo Rossi and the Modern Movement. Like Rossi’s, it was also a melancholic and critical position. It was an architecture that carefully looked for differences and analogies in the city and tried to make those differences and analogies speak. In doing so, it also had to be an architecture of restraint, but this restraint was voluntary and never got in the way of a love for building, for detailing and materialization. Neither did the budgets in the recent past. Here, in Neu-Oerlikon, the only lesson a newer generation of Swiss architects seems to have learnt from the previous generation is that they have to restrain themselves. Thereby, the marriage between Rossi and Modernism has been reduced and hollowed out to an extremely uninspired and limited repertoire of formalist clichés. Maybe it is because the relationship between existing and new buildings is almost the reverse of what is usual in Switzerland. So, the new architecture can’t be the key exception that shines and makes shine. Fact is, that it is the remaining old industrial buildings that take up that role. Thus, they do not show what this quarter is or wants to be, but just what it used to be.
What certainly plays a role in the hollowness the architecture in Neu-Oerlikon radiates is the materialization of the buildings. The facades just form a thin skin around them. That is not just the case when they are made from glass or when there is a layer of movable sunscreens in front of balconies. Most striking is this hollowness in those buildings that suggest having a massive façade in which windows, doors and balconies are cut out. Just these buildings, suggesting having their origin in the nineteenth century and early modernist tenement blocks, do not really have traditional massive walls, but have their thermal insulation on the outside. That is not something one just notices when one nocks on the façade and hears ‘plock’, but that somehow works through in their visual appearance. I don’t know exactly what it is: the sharper, graphic details, the flatness, the colours that are too bright? Fact is, that it makes the buildings look more graphic and, actually, as if they are made out of paper.

Simulacra
More than to De Chirico and Mario Sironi, the image of Neu-Oerlikon therefore corresponds to the work of Thomas Demand. Demand is known for his photographs of paper models made after photographs he found in newspapers or in books. The final result looks incredibly realistic and one has to think carefully what makes these images so disturbing. What are lacking are exactly the traces of wear and tear and of human life. Just therefore the images, that usually have a subject matter that is not of particular interest at first sight, stimulate the desire to know what has happened here that made someone take the photograph. Some of Demand’s works are about alienation in the Marxist sense, particularly when he deals with mass production. Indeed, when asked, almost all the spaces on Demand’s spaces have witnessed a particular event or were spaces people passed on their way to, for example, a murder. As photographs of models built after photographs, Demand’s photos are not just simulacra; they are simulacra of things and environments that themselves only witnessed the person or the action that was the reason they were photographed. There is something similar about the architecture in Neu-Oerlikon. This architecture is the exact opposite of a lived space. It builds on types and appearances. Originally, there may have been reasons for its form and appearance. But we have forgotten why. All references to industrial architecture refer to a society that does not exist any more. Therefore individuality immediately becomes loneliness and public space emptiness.

1)    Christoph Wieser, Von Parks und Plätzen im Zentrum Zürich Nord, wbw 5|2003

Aus der Ausgabe 09-2006