WS 2018 Pairi Daeza of Otelfingen
Yi Song.

To create a new beginning, is the ultimate good will of modernity. The planers in 1959 studied the principles of building a new city at this place.
 By forming cores of a city, the planners hoped to transform a society into communities.
 These spirits of modernity have been challenged by values full of contradictions. The skyscraper was rejected in order to protect the picturesque of landscape, while the warehouse occupying a huge area, was permitted.
 The golf park is opened to public, but the meadow is not.
 The industrial zone is in the middle of four villages, but does not serve as a center.

If „it was heartbreaking to have to imagine here, a city… “, is a solution to keep away from it?

Therefore we have a new park with borders and a crown. It will be a new public park without noises, a playground for exhausted employees, a display yard for newest industrial productions, a place for celebrations, a show case, a habitat for lives others than humans, a block of residence. A poetic world near material world. A vacuum with value, a wasteland and a wonderland, introverted and public. An autonomous place with joy and hope that enlightens this entire area.

As a place with idyll substance, Otelfingen has valued landscape in picture, but not the real landscape. Both the lowered tower of the warehouse and the golfpark is friendly to the picturesque, but they are not the real landscape, not the consideration on earth, water, and other natural factors. ‘Nature‘ usually means nostalgia in an urban area, but for the countryside, it is a working place. While an urban area provides a lot of places for relaxation and social activities, we usually suppose that the countryside already has those places, which is always not the fact. If Otelfingen was afraid of urbanism, I would suggest a way to settle an urban center without destroy the picturesque. This special center connects the four villages, and the city Zürich. That is a Park with artificial landscape in an urban block with mixed functions. This park will be a defection from the paradoxical value on picturesque:

By keeping the lowered tower when demolishing the repetitive parts of the huge warehouse, regenerating its tower appearance. 
By leaving the boundary and the facade as limitation of expansion.
 By exposing the columns and beam, and placing them parallel with trunks and branches of plants.

Project by: Yi Song

Studio Alex Lehnerer, ETH