I have never been there but I heard about this project in a talk about city design and regeneration and thought it was one of the most fun things I had come across in a while. And it managed the rare feat of actually making me consider visiting Switzerland to see it.
St. Gallen is a conservative swiss banking town that oddly enough seems to have a town council with a sense of adventure. The Schweizer Verband der Raiffeisenbanken and the City of St. Gallen fed up by how lifeless their town centre had become, held a public competition to redesign the central city square so as to bring life back into it. And out of all the entries the chose this one! It’s fun and amusing, and it worked!
City Lounge or Stadtlounge was constructed in 2005 in the Raiffeisenplatz in the centre of St. Gallen and is an intriguing outdoor living space with a twist designed by Carlos Martinez in collaboration with Pipilotti Rist.
The idea seems to have been to cover the whole are in a red carpet in a bid to make it look like a living room and a fun inviting place you would like to hang around in. Beds, chairs, benches, tables, the fountain and a car where covered with 4103 square metres of tartane and various other media.
I, for one, like it! I like random, irreverent things and I am all for anything that makes visiting the city even more of an adventure!
sources:
www.hauserwirth.com
archide.wordpress.com
all photos by Thomas Mayer
pandora pavlides 