At Triemli, every piece of ground is at the same time the roof of something else; roof lights, ventilation shafts, embankments, parking entrances.

 
There is a peculiarly ambiguous feel to the landscape surrounding the hospital buildings and the three towers. Despite its modernist ambition of being a generous park, the space between the buildings turns out to be a merely thin green layer covering a monstrous basement, a hidden plinth, proliferating below our feet and potentially combining all buildings on site. However, like organs without a body, none of these buildings establishes a true connection with the surrounding, depriving them of any sense of publicness and urbanity.

 
This paradox could become the project. Groundworks proposes a continuous infrastructure connecting and activating existing below and above ground spaces beyond the binary understanding of inside and outside, of city and nature. This infrastructure unveils a new type of urban landscape which can be experienced as a continuous sequence of open and enclosed spaces - a specific and heterogeneous body composed of what was already there, once resting in pieces and now truly connecting the Stadt Hotel with the city of Zurich.

 
As we ponder the future of the three towers, let's look beyond them. Linking what was formerly isolated is an operation which focusses on the space between buildings and existing rooms, a perimeter generally ignored by those fetishizing the architectural object. Yet this negative space probably offers the greatest potential to transform the city hospital and its three towers into a living environment, a place of confrontation and non-canonization, allowing for a multitude of activities and encounters. A place open to the public and open to the city.

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