The Trouvailles format focuses on the role and responsibility of architects in the development of public space. With this format, the AWB would like to invite the public and architects to perceive the city in a new way. This year, the award goes to the Basel architects Truwant + Rodet +. Under the title “Cyclical Tales – Zyklische Erzählungen”, the office will implement interventions at several locations in the city during the AWB that visualize the city’s relationship to the Rhine and its tributaries in the urban sphere – ecosystems, historical layers and potential free-ranging open spaces for the future.

Throughout the week from 9–15 May 2022, Trouvailles enliven different places in the city with a series of social, acoustic and spatial performances – along the St. Alban-Teich, Bachgraben and Riehenteich, in conjunction with the AWB Forum.

For centuries water has carved out our territory and as a consequence shaped the organization of our urban fabric. The presence of rivers within cities became a major asset for industrial and cultural growth. For Basel, the significance of the Rhine for the small and big stories of the city is very well known. But the hidden tales of its small tributaries, tightly woven within the streets of Basel are maybe even more formative for the urban context.

Between the 13th and the 19th centuries, a system of artificial canals was built in the city center area, fed by the surrounding hills. Used for commercial transport or as a resource in the tanning and printing industry, on one hand, water was a prominent economical feature for the city, on the other hand, it became a source of disease. Today’s industrial production moved to the peripheries and some of the tributaries disappeared, flow underground or became a picturesque postcard image. As they lost their initial functions they don’t actively shape our cities anymore. But if we follow their hidden course above ground, we can discover traces of their former presence or functions, historical layers, complex ecosystems, and imagine other potential futures.

Connected to the three AWB forums, the St. Albanteich, the Bachgraben and the Riehenteich reveal different stories about the relationship between the city and the water. Each of the three tributaries presents a distinctive and complex narrative, telling tales of deers and dinosaurs, buried treasure and looming danger, landscape machines and dead-end streets.

Next to making these 3 waterways back visible in the city by physically retracing them in the streets of Basel, the public space they create will be activated by a series of social, acoustic, and spatial performances revealing the potential for future uses to be unraveled. Ten kilometers of cyclical tales to be told during AWB.

Participants

-> Truwant + Rodet + Freudiger +
Theresa Berlinger, Melissa Freudiger, Moritz Maeder, Dries Rodet, Charlotte Truwant, Thierry Vuattoux
-> The sound-art collective “Cornflowerblue”, supported by the Hochschule für Musik FHNW / Musik-Akademie Basel. The people participating are: Anna Sowa, Maria Muñoz Lopez, Iulia Andreea Smeu, Jasper Mehler, Phileas Baun
-> Kollektiv Hotel Regina