_ swiss sausage
tag: [work] [phygital] [digi]
date: 20210929
classification: Basel Pavillon 2022
location: Basel Switzerland
collaborator: Kaiho Yu
status: Unsuccessful
The proposal transforms discarded building components through a workflow modeled on sausage production. Developed for the Basel Pavillon 2022 competition, the project treats recycling not simply as material reuse, but as a design procedure in which heterogeneous components are coated, ground, aggregated, and wrapped into new architectural assemblies. Conceived as both spatial infrastructure and public interface, the pavilion proposes a circular material strategy grounded in locally sourced construction waste.
Drawing on the logic of food production, the project borrows from the typology of sausage—a product that appears across cultures in radically different forms while maintaining a recognizable relationship between skin and contents. This distinction between heterogeneous interior and containing envelope becomes an organizational model for the architectural process.
Since the rise of industrialized construction, building materials have increasingly been organized through mass production, standardization, modularity, and panelization. While these systems accelerated construction and urban development, they also privileged standardized components and assemblies whose value often diminishes once they fall outside their intended systems of use. Swiss Sausage asks whether architectural production can instead accommodate material difference rather than eliminate it.
Recycled building components are reprocessed through a choreographed sequence adapted from sausage-making. First, materials are “flavored” through layers of paint that visually and materially register disparate components. They are then ground and recombined into composite masses before being cast within a soft net. Rather than restoring waste to standardized building products, the process produces assemblies in which difference remains visible: the enclosure holds heterogeneous materials together without requiring them to become identical.
