The Corner on the Expanded Field

An urban corner on a small block needs to be resolved within a rather limited footprint—it can be chamfered, lapped, filleted, or left open, but the “corner” always occurs at the corner (i.e. the vertex of a larger polygon). A larger superblock or ‘superhof,’ like Bullingerhof, provides a unique opportunity to resolve the corner over an area that extends beyond the confines of the block’s perimeter edge.

The nearby Kirche Hard and the Bullingerhof Kindergarten comprise a kind of “exploded figure.” The Kindergarten appears to have been carved out of the church and translated across Bullingerstrasse, cutting through the slabs of collective housing. Here, two buildings work together to define a large urban space that cuts against the grain of the dominant morphological structure. Working with this formal logic, this project creates an expanded or exploded figure, which mimics the chamfered corners at the intersection of Hardstrasse & Bullingerstrasse. Instead simply adding the missing chamfer at the street’s edge, the project pulls this oblique edge into the Hof, leaving an Uffizian gallery as a spatial residue.