Patrick Düblin

‘Europabrücke Exclusive. Detours through Zurich-Altstetten’ is a project that emerged from an ETH seminar with architecture students (2019) and a resulting publication by gta Verlag (2020).

Built in the 1960s, the massively oversized Europabrücke (Europe Bridge) is a striking gateway to Altstetten, a rapidly changing neighborhood in Zurich. The students’ task was to create an atmospheric image of this urban palimpsest by exploring the neighborhood on foot along the traffic axis, deliberately avoiding the bridge and taking alternative, “crooked” paths instead.

Equipped with notebooks and disposable cameras, and trained on texts by Robert Smithson, Michel de Certeau, and Lucius Burckhardt, they created eleven individual portraits of the area. The different routes reflect the almost infinite possibilities open to pedestrians within the given path system, while the series of photographs show the banal and the poetic, the ugly and the aesthetic appearance of this suburban conglomerate.

In the publication, the various route portraits were supplemented by critical texts on the genesis of the bridge and the cultural history of the detour. Instead of a traditional vernissage, a collective walk with the artist San Keller took place, during which the book served as a starting point for situational, playful interventions and was thus symbolically transferred back into the urban space of Altstetten.