Dining Room

The project questions how urban space acknowledges the people whose labor sustains the city. At Hardturm, truck drivers have developed everyday practices that transform their vehicles into temporary domestic environments, adapting spaces designed for transit into places for eating, resting, and socializing.

Yet these acts of inhabitation remain unsupported by the surrounding urban infrastructure. Rather than replacing these existing forms of domesticity, the project extends them into the public realm by proposing spaces where collective meals can happen.

The intervention restructures the ground floor of the parking garage as a landscape of dining platforms, gardens, and shared facilities that connect the parking structure with its surroundings. By reducing sealed surfaces, the proposal shifts the site's priorities from the efficient accommodation of vehicles to the quality of everyday life.

Reused asphalt forms a mineral topography supporting a lightweight timber structure, while vegetation introduces new ecological and spatial conditions. Decorative patterns inspired by Zurich wallpapers of the dining rooms of the 1970s trouble the Modern language of domestic spaces and extend the drivers' own spatial practices into a shared environment.

The project ultimately argues that the right to the city also includes the right to stop, gather, eat, and inhabit space collectively.

Spring 2026

Project by: Aida Skenderi, Vera Martins Lucas, Keerthana Kahnaverl, Wanru Zhao

Teaching team: Anna Puigjaner, Dafni Retzepi, Paule Perron,Valentina Noce, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Lisa Maillard, Pol Esteve Castelló, He Shen

Images 1, 2, 3: Luís Úrculo

Images 4, 5, 6: Pierre Marmy