On Common Ground: Schlieren - Upper Engadine. Photographs of Spatial Development

Description

"On Common Ground" is a photographic history of spatial development in post-war Switzerland illustrated through 250 images with complementing essays. The development of settlements is documented by the idealised examples of Schlieren, which grew from an agricultural village to an industrial town and eventually to a cluster of service firms and residential suburbs of Zurich, and the Upper Engadine, the world famous mountain resort around St. Moritz in the Canton of Grisons. The authors have put together a vast collection of photographs found in archives of all sorts: local government offices, building companies, local and national newspapers, publishers of postcards, cultural heritage societies and amateur photographers. Such images have rarely been collected and analysed systematically. "On Common Ground" presents these pictures in a double-track, chronological sequence: the top part of each page shows Schlieren, the Upper Engadine takes the bottom half. The concept reveals manifold references, discrepancies and parallels between the two places. It makes traceable the passing of time and all the changes it imposes at times synchronically, in some periods at a different pace in each place. Some developments unfold at great speed in one place and stemmed in the other. Text in English and German.

Ulrich Gorlich, born 1952 in Germany, has been working with photography as an artistic medium since 1977. He has been teaching as a professor at the Zurich University for the Arts (ZHdK) and its preceding institution, School of Art and Design Zurich(hgkz), since 1990. Meret Wandeler, born in Zurich in 1967, was educated in photography at the former School of Art and Design Zurich (hgkz, now Zurich University for the Arts ZHdK) and the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1990 - 95. She works on artistic research projects on photography and spatial development in Zurich. Wandeler also realises actions as a performance artist and other artistic projects as a freelance photographer. Christian Schmid, born 1958 in Zurich, read geography and sociology at the University of Zurich. He has been teaching as a lecturer at the Department of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) since 2001 and at ETH Studio Basel since 2007. He has been a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich since 2009.