Patrick Düblin

On November 1, 1986, a fire broke out at a Sandoz chemical plant in Schweizerhalle, near Basel. The water used to extinguish the fire flowed unfiltered into the Rhine, turning it red for a while and killing off the entire fish population. As a result, numerous retention basins were built in the region, including the “Reservoir” on the Dreispitz site in Basel, two basins in the basement of a parking garage that are no longer functional due to structural changes.

In response to the call of the Architekturwochen Basel to reuse the two basins, Team Potluck (Patrick Düblin, Fabrizio Furiassi, Ida Incognito and Stanislava Predojević) proposes a permanent memorial to the catastrophe of that time. The “Memorial to the Dead Fish” aims to draw attention to the fact that “Schweizerhalle” is not over, but on the contrary is constantly repeating itself in other parts of the world. In fact, the improvement in local water quality since the environmental disaster is the result not only of higher safety standards, but also of the outsourcing of much chemical and pharmaceutical production to third countries with less stringent regulations.

Our intervention transforms the Reservoir into a place of remembrance with a double program. The first room is flooded and illuminated in red. Historical radio recordings recall the day zero of the event. A giant mirror on the ceiling reflects the light and the subtle movements of the water, creating a solemn and sublime atmosphere. The second room is a flexible forum for critical exhibitions and symposia on industrial heritage from an environmental, social and cultural preservation perspective. Design elements include stairs, curtains and metal barrels. The latter create a tension between the potentially dangerous contents of the barrels in the forum and the implied consequences of the actual contamination in the red-colored basin.

Through its commemorative and communicative functions, this hidden infrastructure aims to make visible the transcalar nature of ecological disasters, and to draw lessons on more-than-human entanglements at local, regional, and global scales.

The project was exhibited during Architekturwochen Basel, September 7 to 13, 2024, and an excerpt was published in ARCH+ features, 123 (September 2024).