Light tread: A new urban landmark in the industrial fringe of Zurich provides a high-technology canvas for young artists and a necessary facility for drivers. (design review).

The tyre-fitting workshop is an uncommon subject for architectural attention. Like urban garages, car parts shops and so on, such places tend to spring up spontaneously like weeds in wastelands and interstices of cities. This one in Switzerland has been designed with an imaginative eye on context and purpose by Camenzind Grafensteiner, a youthful Zurich practice.

The workshop is part of the semi-industrial fringe of Zurich, between the railway station of Zurich-Wollishofen, a bus stop and the main road into the city centre. The area, in common with other such city fringes, is one of perpetual change and movement, of factories, small start-up companies, petrol stations, 24 hour shops, night clubs and a continual stream of traffic. It forms a kind of filter between what the architects call 'an increasingly disassociated world of work' and green suburbia.

The brief asked for an efficient functional building with a strong visual image, and in designing it, the architects have elaborated on the idea of movement. Running parallel to the railway track, the building is a mysterious luminous object in the landscape, its upper part apparently a solid piece of kinetic art. In fact, wrapped around all four sides of the exterior is an interactive communication surface. This is the medium for a continuous illuminated show by a succession of young artists whose work is sponsored by tyre manufacturers. Invited to make their mark on the workshop, they remove their work from the seclusion of the gallery and take cues from their fast-moving, commercial surroundings.

Inside the two-storey building, the ground floor contains the workshop, and the first, a tyre store. The structure's footprint was determined by the shape of the long irregular site and vehicle turning circles. Since it had to be constructed quickly, the architects settled on a steel frame, concrete floors and insulated panels which are covered with a layer of glass to form rainscreen cladding. On the first floor, the panels are set back from glass faces to accommodate the illuminated artwork.

In a conscious attempt to exploit architecture's semiotic potential, the architects have made use of new technology. First encountered as a beacon in the urban landscape, the workshop becomes a drive-by gallery for people passing in cars and trains, and a source of entertainment for others at bus stops. It is, say the architects, the first of a series of cultural markers by the practice to be placed around Zurich. V.G.

Architect

Camenzind Grafensteiner, Zurich""

Project architects

Stefan Camenzind, Michael Grafensteiner.

Susanne Zenker

Art installation

Martina Issler

Photographs

Peter Wurmli 1, 2, 3, 6

Martina Issler 4, 5, 7, 8