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2025

AAM Diploma
Atelier Miller

Schanzenstrasse 9
4056 Basel
Switzerland

47.563841, 7.583225

Currently the project site is occupied by a building to be demolished for the widening of Schanzenstrasse, in Basel's St. Johann quarter, to accommodate a new tram line. The project takes that demolition as its premise. At street level, a sequence of tram stops gathered around fountains beneath a single overhanging roof; behind them, a ground floor left entirely open, occupied by an archive and a library.

The façade is clad in heavily glazed ceramic tile, its blue subject to light and refraction, working against the monotony of a dark street and declaring the garden behind it — a planted courtyard with a basin of water, until now cut off, now entered directly from the pavement.

The ground floor reads as concrete, but the structure above it is a hybrid: concrete remains only in the party walls between units, while the floor slabs and the internal and external walls are timber, painted grey into the range of the concrete beside them. The apartments are two-storey units, their rooms differing in size and character, all facing the garden; openings run between them in sequence, so that one room is always visible from another, and the unit begins to behave less like an apartment than like a house. On the courtyard side the timber façade is curved into a series of recesses. The building fragments, each recess takes a different view, and the scale that results a suprise not expeted from the street presence.

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