Lido Mythenkai

Architectural project
Location _Zürich | Swizzerland
Concept _Perspective constructions

Our design for a new Kiosk building for the Mythenquai seaside resort is based on adjacent building typologies of the lake and its clear but highly suggestive building form and orientation: in its long axis axisymmetric and vertically oriented to the lake, built in a simple wood construction, the Kiosk building opens with a sweeping gesture towards Lake Zurich and thus takes the spectacular alpine landscape and the immense panorama in itself. The design constructs a clearly structured, withal archetypal and timeless-looking place that faces the openness explicitly. It strengthens and promotes a relaxed mood for the visitors who escape the everyday stress by relaxing by the lake for the day. The design reacts osmotically to the surrounding environment, staged visual relations, perspectives and views, frames landscapes into landscape images. This architecture promotes the peace and quiet to concentrate on the essence and atmosphere of having time, of taking time.

Two shade giving and rain protected colonnaded corridors in the south and north, and broad cantilevered roofs in the east and west create especially for summer months the important areas of transition from inside to outside and generate the airy spaces in between, which is familiar to us from the japanese home culture or – on a larger scale – the european Spa architecture, such as Baden-Baden or Marienbad. The ground, completely covered with weather resistant wood planks, allows the association with a ship deck or spacious wooden verandas as they are represented in the paintings of Edward Hopper: afternoons pass, the shadows are getting longer. The parabolic wooden main support structure of the large hall cites geometries from ships and airships: In this hall are of course neither ships nor airships, the high arch and dome shaped space however extends the conceptual horizons of the visitors. A place of expanded possibilities.