Adrian Streich - Città analoga

About

For his exhibition, Adrian Streich draws inspiration from Aldo Rossi’s città analoga (analogous city) from the 1960s in which built works and designs are lifted from their usual context and arranged in a new topographical landscape. In this case, four projects by different architects are transferred to the Architekturgalerie on Karl-Marx-Allee to create an imaginary place. While the presentation and comparison of different architectural references aims to provoke discussion, their topographical arrangement anchors them in reality. For Adrian Streich, this dehistoricizing process provides a basis for discussing issues that are central to the design of contemporary urban spaces. At the same time, the exhibition reflects the approach Adrian Streich generally takes in his work, which makes use of large urban models.

In homage to Aldo Rossi, Streich includes the latter’s Quartier Schützenstrasse (Berlin, 1997) in his imaginary urban space. Opposite this, Streich situates one of the Torri INA residential towers on Viale Etiopia (Rome, 1954) by Mario Ridolfi and Wolfgang Frankl. Both projects interpret the urban spaces typical of their location – closed and open – in a specific way: in Berlin as an idealistic reconstruction of a perimeter block, in Rome as a variant of the palazzina (compact apartment building). The Torri INA are a fundamental reference for Adrian Streich and inspired his design of the seven towers of the Werdwies housing development (Zurich, 2007) – his first major building project, which is also included in the show. Meanwhile, a model of Streich’s Freihofstrasse apartment building (Zurich, currently under construction), with its 130-meter-long stretch of alternating brick and plaster facades, is juxtaposed with Rossi’s block on Schützenstrasse.

Adrian Streich founded his practice in Zurich in 1998 and today runs it together with Judith Elmiger, Tobias Lindenmann, Annemarie Stäheli, and Roman Brantschen. In particular, they have realized numerous residential buildings and schools, including the Werdwies housing complex (Zurich, 2007), the Kraftwerk1 Heizenholz housing complex (Zurich, 2011), the Letzibach subarea C housing complex (Zurich, 2015), the Zinzikon school building (Winterthur, 2015), and the Schauenberg school complex (Zurich, 2019). An extensive monograph of Adrian Streich’s work was published by Park Books in 2019.