Cabineta

In collaboration with Martina Kausch Architekt:innen, we have been awarded the commission to renovate the rear courtyard building of the COHABITAT residential cooperative on Kraftstrasse in Basel, currently occupied by multiple ateliers. The project focuses on reorginising access to the individual work spaces, applies a tailored energy retrofit, and expanding the shared community facilities.

An abandoned house in Canton 10 of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is to be converted into a creative residency. In a region shaped by war and emigration, it will become a place for return, future-oriented projects, and cross-border collaboration. The programme combines atelier and living space with residencies and a platform for exchange between cultural workers from Switzerland and Bosnia. A soft intervention allows the architecture to become a socio-cultural caralyst, an interactive setting to the artistic process of forming new narratives.

How are everyday spaces of long-term migrants in Switzerland shaped? Do they inform their neighbourhoods with elements of their culture of origin? What spatial dimensions does social integration take – and what architectural interactions emerge from it? A visual and ethnographic exploration of the micro-stories of communities with a migrant background – a new research project we are launching with the support of the Canton of Basel-Stadt.

What would Basel and its surrounding landscapes look like if the city were to achieve 70% self-sufficiency in vegetable and fruit production? The printed version of our urban study «Archipelago of Urban Gardens» has arrived!

Abstract collage depicting a bottom-up, fine-grain agroecology for the city of Basel, invertedly inspired by O.M. Ungers’ «Green Archipelago» of Berlin. Community supported agriculture projects (CSA) contribute to urban CO₂ emissions reduction, gaining relevance through a multiplication of their communities and sites. Utilising regenerative soil practises, they are able to create carbon sinks for the city.

«Archipelago of Urban Gardens» includes an in-depth portrait of the CSA co-operative plankton - die Gemüsekooperative aus der Stadt, depicting their soil practices to reveal the potentials in supporting such initiatives, as well as to share knowledge with those interested in setting up new gardens. Here a planting strategy is depicted, whereby certain strips are sown with typical meadow species, including beneficial organisms for the natural enriching of the soil and a natural defence against pests.

Proposal for new zones in Basel to promote soil protection and the supply of local produce: *Garden Islands* allow for participative and wild gardening; *Ecotones* negotiate between neighbourhood and open landscape, densifying uses to include fruit and nut tree groves as well as infrastructures such as glasshouses for growing seedlings and «Food Factories» for food processing; *Urban Landscapes* envelop the densifying city and are kept free from construction, developing into veritable ecological corridors and productive fields feeding the city. The strategy of overlaying acknowledges existing urban management practice, where categories are superimposed to existing zones which retain validity.

On the occasion of publishing «Open Access: ETH Studio Basel», the complete digital archive of the body of written works of the institute, a public symposium entitled «ETH Studio Basel Open Access: A Public Launch» was held in Zurich on May 7, 2024. Three roundtables reflected on major research trajectories and offered an outlook for teaching and practice. Vesna Jovanović together with Manuel Herz, Jacques Herzog, Jasmine Kastani, Bart Lootsma, Milica Topalović and Ying Zhou during the talk on «Specificity and Urbanisation», the research arc which resulted in the «Territory» book.

The apartment renovation in Cvijićeva ulica, Belgrade, involved removing one part of the entrance hall wall to bring sunlight transversally across the apartment. This relieved pressure from the hall to function merely as a junction to all the other rooms and created softer spatial transitions. The original herringbone oak parquet was carefully preserved and indistinguishable extensions were added to repair the missing area left open by the wall's removal.

The renovation entailed a restoration of the box-type balcony door and façade windows, with inner (winter) and outer panels typical of 1950's construction in Belgrade, appropriate to the cold climes of continental Europe. The panels needed slight knob repairs and a renewal of all the weatherboards. Afterwards they were carefully repainted and remounted. Thermal insulation was applied to the inner side of the façade wall and subsequently all interior sills were replaced.

In the original 1954 floorplan a compact, functional kitchen had been encased within a niche endowed with a tiny ventilation window and reachable solely via the dining room. We proposed to rotate bathroom and kitchen around the installation shaft, and place the kitchen in a new communal hearth adjacent to the entrance and situated between living room and balcony. The renovation provided an opportunity to carve out a second balcony door from this new centre, inscribing a dynamic of movement in stark contrast to the cellular ordering logic prevailing before.

Commission for multiple pieces of furniture for a small apartment with a considerable need for various different types of closed and open storage. Moveable coffee table with four compartments dimensioned according to common paper standards to stack readings.

«A shelf to hold a 1001 tales!», this bookshelf was conceived with an incremental gradient of shelf-heights starting with tall at the bottom—for art books and heavy compendia—moving towards less tall at the top—for novels and tracts on economy and politics.

Detail view of «A shelf to hold a 1001 tales!»: a soft visual hierarchy is introduced between the orthogonal elements, accenting more the horizontal lines which form a calm stratification from afar. Strata are further differentiated with full and dashed lines to signal changes in shelf height for ease of use.

Slender, standing piece of furniture offering enclosed storage. Set in the living room, it can contain different sorts of objects: a collection of vinyl's, a selection of digestifs, travelogues for the next vacation, the cinema program, the home projector with all its cables, strength-training dumbbells, or others still! Small and unassuming as a piece of furniture, the two compartments inside are dimensioned generously to allow unforeseen uses as can happen to be needed in the living room.

Our competition entry for cantonal housing in Volta Nord, Basel, posits the kitchen as a narrow strip of nondescript compartments, a thickening in a wall in the house. It blends in as do other built-in closets, consciously choosing to not stand out as a specific and specified space. This allows for the emergence of queer, passage-like spaces that permit unexpected uses to emerge. With this design we have initiated an investigation into the potential use of kitchen space in contemporary living, as depending on the visual code of the kitchen furniture and the space allocated in front of it, attempting to de-codify and disentangle its prescribed way of being.

«La Svolta» advocated a closed-block answer to the plot, which lies close to an industrial area of Basel's North, to deal with noise emissions arriving on site. The urban form appears as if revolving around itself and jittering in light sways, the movement generating protected loggias and half-enclosed terraces that help with both noise dispersal and apartment ventilation. The building's form gently recedes to tuck itself inward, thereby strengthening the sequencing of important public spaces.

The S AM Swiss Architecture Museum, together with the city planning authority set up an exhibition and series of talks entitled «Basel 2050», asking how Basel should tackle its growth in the coming decades. Showcased in sequential rooms were the city model of 1960 («Yesterday»), the built model of 2020 («Today»), and one containing all currently planned new developments («Tommorrow»). Invited by Studio Céline Baumann to collaborate on the scenography, we conceived of a speculative model of the future city in the last room in the sequence («After Tommorrow»). Entitled «Terra Incognita», the model was a planted earth bed covered with carved out metal plates donning an urban-block silhouette of the city. Revealing the dark earth below symbolised at once rich soil and precious land resources locked-in by the built mass, a re-evaluation of what's there, but evoked also an uncertainty by visually highlighting the fact that over two thirds of the city are covered in private plots.

The speculative model was made up of 6 earth beds, planted through the plan-in-negative of the city.

Schwesterprojekt was a queer-feminist collective co-founded in Basel by Céline Baumann, Anja Haldimann, Vesna Jovanović, Samara Leite Walt, Selina Locher, Laurent Rueff and Yuma Shinohara. We appropriated multiple kindred spaces spread across the city, organising events inlcuding a queer bingo night, non-commercial community gathering pop-ups and a squat closure party. During several weeks we were in the experimental art space Kasko, where we exhibited the work of Alexandra Devaux, and during which we held a round-table discussion on vulnerability in relation to positive expressions of masculinity and a concert by Legion Seven.

The housing association Klybeck approached architect Martina Kausch to conduct astudy of its possible expansion into the large neighouring industrial site of Klybeckplus. Vesna Jovanović was invited to join due to her experience on the test-planning of Klybeckplus. The team included landscape architect Céline Baumann and architectural historian Martin Josephy. Final workshop presenting four different urban forms to the association, who is still today developing a dialogue with the new owners of Klybeckplus, not wanting to relocate away.

Co-edited by Mathias Gunz and research lead Vesna Jovanović, the last publication of the teaching chair of Professors Roger Diener and Marcel Meili at ETH Studio Basel represents an empirical look on *territory*, the large-scale physical surface upon which and in exchange with which cities and landscapes evolve. *Territory* means an understanding of the hinterland as the entire natural environment, its resources, man-built structures and infrastructures, as well as its historical layers and cultural systems of meaning.

We view each building as having a material index and consuming energy over time. We formulate project goals and define design methods to work with existing, useful structures and spaces, placing new materials where they will have optimum impact and efficiency. We expermient with construction materials that have low CO₂ emmissions and that constitute carbon sinks. Furthermore, we investigate passive energy systems and synergies between architecture and MEP-installations. We plan for long life-cycles and assess products in the building industry for longevitiy and robustness. We maintain established spatial qualities and identities that have usually taken a long time to form, and we inscribe flexibility of use as a baseline for design choices.

We apply ecological knowledge to urban design. New constructions should preserve natural resources upon which we base our existence. Built interventions need to become the basis for the establishment of new living conditions, both enriching biodiversity and repairing broken or lost ecologies. Our own spaces of shelter and food production are therefore designed and spatially distrubuted as integral components of a global web of life. Production sites, forests, agricultural landscapes stand in relationship to new residential neighbourhoods and the existing city.

We design within an intersectional gaze, considering mechanisms of power and marginalisation. Our interest is to create spaces where different groups of people feel included and empowered. A conscious avoidance of prescribed and exclusive ways of using buildings guides us to create sensitive, unfinished spaces, that allow immediate appropriation and future definition by its users over time.

2026 ongoing
Conversion Creative Residency and Work Space, Prekaja, Bosnia & Herzegovina

2026 ongoing
Retrofit Atelier House Kraftstrasse, Association COHABITAT, with Martina Kausch Architekt:innen, Basel

2025 2026
:: 1. Prize :: Ideas Sketch Retrofit Atelier House Kraftstrasse, Association COHABITAT, with Martina Kausch Architekt:innen, Basel

2025 ongoing
«Invisible Cities - Microhistories of Migrant Communities», Research on everyday spaces of longterm migrants living in Basel, Recherchebeitrag Kanton BS

2025
Compendium of Biodiversity Maintenance plankton, Basel & surroundings

2024
«Archipelago of Urban Gardens - What role for small-scale vegetable gardens in the development of sustainable urban landscapes?», Toolkit for the garden co-operative plankton, Basel & surroundings

2022 2023
Renovation Cvijićeva ulica, with Marko Macura, Belgrade

2022
4 Pieces of Furniture, Basel

2021
Competition Stadtbaustein Volta Nord Baufeld 5, with Pararaum, Basel

2020
Scenography «Terra Incognita», S AM Forum «Basel 2050», with Studio Céline Baumann, Basel

2018 2019
«Schwesterprojekt», community project, Basel

2018
Study «Klybeck Triangle», Association Klybeck, with Martina Kausch Architects, Studio Céline Baumann and Martin Josephy, Basel

2012 2016
ETH research project & publication «Territory - On the Development of Landscape and City», @ETH Studio Basel, Contemporary City Institute, Basel

Architect-researcher and queer-feminist activist Vesna Jovanović founded Cabineta to develop and test socially inclusive and ecologically responsible interventions in the built environment. We support individuals, entrepreneurs, building committees, public authorities and institutions through physical transformation processes that preserve resources, avoid generating new waste and inscribe novel societal added-value.

Our practice is a workroom for founding and advancing new ideas. We exhibit current investigations, discuss collectively, and archive knowledge in order to sift through it again and obtain new insights. Cabineta is both a cabinet of curiosities and a room of one's own, in the Woolfian sense—a space for unfettered, creative work.

As an employer we wish to assemble a diverse, creative and diligent team, that understands our profession as a public service.

Cabineta Architecture + Urban Research
St. Johanns-Vorstadt 17
4056 Basel, Switzerland
info@cabineta.ch

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