Topology – Autumn Semester 2025
Hours: 2 hrs, on Mondays 13:45-15:30
Room: LVML PC-room HIL H40.8
Lecturers: Philipp Urech and Matthias Vollmer
A LIVING NETWORK
As cities expand, they increasingly act as refuges for biodiversity at a time when surrounding landscapes are losing it. Yet urban landscapes are often fragmented and heavily engineered, leading to ecosystems that function poorly as a habitat and provide limited services to people. To achieve meaningful change, ecological principles must become central to urban planning and design. Creating living surfaces that offer refuge to diverse fauna and flora that can connect with wider ecological networks, turns the built environment into an active participant in biodiversity support. Creased topography helps retain water, such as keyline systems in the Slow Waters strategy, but it also provides better niches for fauna and flora. It is essential to ecological corridors that serve as connecting axes from urban to regional landscapes, linking nature reserves and other valuable ecological habitats. These corridors enhance the functional connectivity of animal and plant populations in fragmented areas, promoting ecological permeability within urban spaces.
Various types of meadows contribute to these corridors: fromental meadows (flower meadows) are nutrient-rich meadows filled with flowers and cut two to three times a year; lean meadows are nutrient-poor, sparser and are cut once or twice a year; wet meadows are high-moisture areas with tall perennial plants; and ruderal habitats contain small pioneer plant communities on gravelly substrates. These diverse habitats are crucial for supporting a wide range of species and strengthening the overall ecological quality of the corridors.
Urban meadows are ideal for people to enjoy and connect with nature. They can include seating areas and spaces for gardening, since ecological improvement does not mean to exclude human use but rather integrate it in a harmonious way. This may be achieved by creating different types of habitats to support a wide range of species. It includes a variety of plantings like fruit trees, nut trees, and native shrubs to provide food and nesting places for birds and insects.
Healthy habitats also hold a rich acoustic diversity. Source: Znidersic, Elizabeth, and David M. Watson. “Acoustic Restoration: Using Soundscapes to Benchmark and Fast-Track Recovery of Ecological Communities.” Ecology Letters 25, no. 7 (2022): 1597–603. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14015.
APPROACH
In his book Drawing Things Together (1990), French philosopher Bruno Latour explained that knowledge is not only produced through experiments and theories, but also through the ways we translate complex realities into forms we can see, read, and reshape. This notion calls for critical thinking, since designers, engineers and scientists all think through the media they use. Also 3D point cloud models—created through laser scanning—are one such media. While these models are widely used in archaeology to produce precise surface measurements, they can also serve as a medium for artistic expression and re-imagination of places. The models not only represent physical reality with great accuracy but also allow us to extend our understanding of a site beyond what we can perceive directly and beyond the simplified codes of maps, where trees, buildings, and landscapes are reduced to generic symbols.
Composed of millions of geometric measures, point cloud models document unique characteristics of places. The raw measures are semantically indiscriminate, dissolving the fictional dichotomy between the “nature” and the “culture” of things. By offering a topological perspective, they support a richer approach where material artefacts and biotic environments are fully intertwined. This perspective invites us to rethink how we shape territories, moving beyond McHarg’s paradigm of designing with nature (1969) toward shaping from within the living and non-living heritage that constitutes anthropic landscapes.
The 60 course participants selected 22 sites they consider problematic — for instance, due to excessive soil sealing or their contribution to urban heat islands — and will propose a digital collage of an urban meadow for each.
ASSIGNMENT
The aim of this course is to broaden the perception of urban green spaces in Zurich and to reflect on their visual and acoustic potential. In teams of two, students will develop an idea to implement an urban meadow in a compelling place of Zurich that currently holds low biodiversity. To achieve this goal, a method of 3D Collage will be used to juxtapose a meadow provided by the course with a chosen site. The meadow is a sample of the Vuebelle project in Höngg, laser-scanned in August 2025 (see figure below). The model represents areas of varied maintenance of the extensive flower meadow. The areas include tall and cut grass patches, community gardens, young trees, walkable surfaces and hedges. The site of collage is instead chosen by the students. The site is a place in Zürich that students wish to improve by unsealing the ground or simply by increasing the capacity to hold fauna and flora. Students need to consider aspects of scale, function and form.
Plan of the Vuebelle project in Höngg, laser-scanned in August 2025 by LVML. Vuebelle was planned by the Bee’n’Bee Association since 2021 and is implemented since 2022 as a biodiversity twin of the Bellevue in Zürich, recreating the layout of the square in plan. https://vuebelle.ch/