_ swiss sausage
tag: [work] [phygital] [digi]
date: 20210929
classification: Basel Pavillon 2022
location: Basel Switzerland
collaborator: Kaiho Yu
status: Unsuccessful
The proposal transforms recycled materials into multiple piles of synthetic material chunks. By collecting abandoned building components from the Basel region, the pavilion demonstrates how material properties can be reinvented through a sequence of designed workflows. Conceived as a space for play and leisure, the pavilion operates as a medium for communicating a new circular strategy for locally sourced recyclable materials.
Drawing on the logic of food production, the project borrows from the typology of sausage, a product that appears across many cultures in varied forms. Despite these differences, sausage maintains a universally recognizable structure that clearly expresses the relationship between skin and contents. This clarity becomes a guiding metaphor for the architectural process.
Since the rise of modernism, building materials have been increasingly shaped by mass production, standardization, modularity, and panelization. While these systems accelerated construction and urban development, they also constrained architectural variation and shortened material life cycles.
In this project, recycled building components are reprocessed through a choreographed sequence inspired by sausage-making. First, the materials are “flavored” by applying paint layers that visually and materially homogenize disparate components. Next, elements are ground and wrapped to bind different parts into composite masses. In the final step, the material is cast within a soft net, forming a new enclosure that stabilizes the aggregated contents while allowing their heterogeneity to remain legible.
