Interview with Tom Weiss and Rolf Jenni of Raumbureau, Zurich

You're going to develop projects for Pilsen and Bordeaux for City Visions. Do you think that there are similarities between the two tasks? What do you think about the combination of these two cities?

Tom Weiss: Well, the tasks are extremely different. In Pilsen, we're obviously expected to deliver a ready-to-build project. That seems to be different in Bordeaux. Each of the two cities has its own agenda for City Visions. But as you know the City-Visions program aims to work on common attributes of these cities, of typical mid-sized European cities. In this respect, yes, the cities themselves share a common ground.

Rolf Jenni: That’s something which was very interesting to discover: the post-socialist city of Pilsen shares quite a few characteristics with the “bourgeois” city of Bordeaux. Of course the housing typologies are different, but on an urban scale you see an urbanity that is marked by a very heterogeneous assemblage of city parts, urban islands, large open green spaces or brown-field areas. Within this, you can identify a sort of archipelago-principle.

Had you ever been to Bordeaux before?

Tom Weiss: No.

What do you think about the assignment in Bordeaux?

Rolf Jenni: Arc-en-Rêve is an independent architecture centre, so they’re looking for a conceptual approach. The municipality of Pilsen as owner of the land, on the other hand, seemed to have quite clear ideas for the specific site.

What's also interesting is that political entities are involved in the discussion in Bordeaux, like Vincent Feltesse, the president of the Communauté Urbaine. The debate about the urban development is also a political discourse.

The choice of sites in Bordeaux is quite open. They were presented as suggestions rather than compulsive locations. Are you planning to stick to those six sites?

Tom Weiss: I think that this project is more about developing a vision for the periphery as a whole than about solving specific problems of certain sites. Everybody here knows what the centre of the city is or should be, but when it comes to the periphery, nobody knows what to do with it.

Rolf Jenni: And this vision should concern the entire surroundings of the city centre. We don't know which sites we'll pick yet. We might even go for a completely different one, if it's more exemplary than the others.

Do you think that your project will be a landscape design or rather an urban plan?

Tom Weiss: Well, we're architects, after all, even though the task was presented as a landscape problem. It's a question of points of view. It's a bit irritating, though, that nobody seems to reflect about the city itself.

Rolf Jenni: It's also possible to act on a bigger scale with architecture. For example with concentrated, selective interventions – precise architecture typologies –, which nevertheless have the potential to generate a form of urbanity.

Tom Weiss: The housing area Parc des Coteaux  in the east of Bordeaux was a good example. It is large-scale, it is nearly an entire city district, but on the other hand the qualities are generated by its specific architecture and not by an abstract concept.

Rolf Jenni: What's interesting is that that happens through a single typology: 4 to 5-storey slabs, which create a different kind of exterior spaces through their L-shapes and surrounding vegetation. This relation between housing and landscape, which generates a certain feeling of community, is fascinating. But on the other hand, the single-family houses and the allotment gardens around Bordeaux also have their qualities. It's the coexistence of different urban forms and qualities we're interested in.

Tom Weiss: This example just emphasises the fact that one can find a rich variety of ‘other spaces’ in the city of Bordeaux. Some of them might be somehow neglected or ignored, but they’re still more than just landscape in need of development. We are trying to avoid this oversimplified, dialectic reading of the ‘city’ on the one hand and ‘nature’ on the other.

Rolf Jenni: As urban researchers, we think that the reading of the city has at first something to do with ‘recognition’. To accept that there are also spaces which are neglected by society, either because they have other values or very often because they are stigmatized due to their negative social implication. Such as Mériadeck, a large post-war area in the centre of Bordeaux. We were very impressed by the way how this ‘legacy of French modernism’ is nearly ignored and has completely lost its raison d’être, becoming a forgotten space despite its undeniable physical presence.

Tom Weiss: To come back to your question: We see this way of ‘reading’ in itself as a sort of urban project. It’s an interpretation based on our subjective perception of what we have seen – and what was possible to see in the short time we spent in Pilsen and Bordeaux. 

Interview by Anneke Bokern for City Visions Europe.