Public Drawing Workshop
Public Drawings in Times of Covid-19

The large drawings drawn by students during two weeks in September 2020 focuses on two situations that at one time in history represented the limits of the city, and thus the management of disease and death and its transcription in architecture, which can also be seen as Commons of the city.

Architektur der Fürsorge shows the university hospital today during the Covid-19 pandemic, managing the flow of staff, public and patients, and the care for the latter, as well as the 13th century Predigerkloster hospital of the Dominican monastery. The former is today at the heart of the city and manages its spatial boundaries within its system, separating its intensive care by fine and almost invisible boundaries, while the latter was built at the city limits and its entire infrastructure arranged behind walls : The visible and the invisible are side by side, the juxtaposition of functions is transformed over time.

Räume der Gemeinschaft shows the Sihlfeld cemetery district in its present state, at the time of the Covid-19 crisis, and in its state in the year 1877, then located at the outskirts of the city. In those times, death was carried to the city borders, close to the countryside and rural activities. The drawing offers insights into the management of public spaces through time, their uses and the transformation of them, and their displacement within free or built spaces. Thus, at the time of the pandemic, certain spaces, such as balconies or the cemetery, had to play the role of common spaces, becoming places of intense life, while parks or schoolyards, closed, empty, could only make the situation of cessation of activities due to the disease even more perceptible.

Those two drawings are a representation of the genealogy of public spaces and infrastructure, a drawn research capable of displaying the transformation of the relation of people with their physical environment.

The drawings have been displayed in the Autumn Semester of 2020 as part of the exhibition “Confinement” at ETH Hönggerberg, gta Exhibitions.