Cabineta

Kreativhaus — An abandoned house in Canton 10 of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is to be converted into a creative residency. 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 catalyst, an interactive setting to the artistic process of forming new narratives. During our first site visit in summer 2026, we were able to inspect the condition of the house, take measurements, clean up, and start demounting non-load-bearing elements, salvaging wood boards, tiles, furniture, and even an old chess set for future use. We managed to locate left-over roof tiles from older construction works in Drvar through local contacts. They were identical to the existing roof tiles, allowing us to replace the cracked tiles that had been letting water in.

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.

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.

gartenarchipel — 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! It 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.

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 trees 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 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».

Cvijićeva ul. — The renovation of the apartment on Cvijićeva ulica in Belgrade was based on the original 1954 floor plan. The compact kitchen was relocated from a niche accessible only from the dining room to a new communal hearth adjacent to the entrance, situated between the living room and the balcony. By removing part of the entrance hall wall, we were able to bring daylight transversally across the apartment. This relieved the hall of its role as a spatial distributor and created softer transitions between the rooms. The original herringbone oak parquet was carefully preserved, with indistinguishable extensions added to repair the missing area left open by the removal of the wall.

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.

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.

4 Möbelstücke — Slender, standing piece of furniture containing two generously sized storage compartments, offering space for the spontaneous and the unforeseen: a collection of vinyl's, a selection of digestifs, travelogues for the next vacation, the home projector with all its cables, strength-training dumbbells, and much more. The bookshelf, by contrast, 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.

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.

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.

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.

2026 ongoing
Feasibility study for a Cabanon, n/a

2026 ongoing
Conversion and renovation of a family house into a creative residency with living and studio space, Prekaja, Bosnia & Herzegovina

2026 ongoing
Retrofit of an atelier house on Kraftstrasse, Association COHABITAT, with Martina Kausch Architekt:innen, Basel

2026
Preliminary Project «Queer Just City»: An assessment of queer-inclusive urban development, LGBTIQ Fund of the Equal Opportunities Office of the Presidium of Basel-Stadt

2025 2026
:: 1. Prize :: Ideas sketch for a retrofit of an atelier house on 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
Competition for the New Triple Kindergarten Kreuzgut, Schaffhausen

2025
Compendium of Biodiversity Maintenance for garden co-operative plankton, Basel & surroundings

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

2022 2023
Renovation of an apartment on Cvijićeva ulica, with Marko Macura, Belgrade

2022
4 Pieces of furniture, n/a

2021
Competition Volta Nord New Urban Block 5, with Pararaum, Basel

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

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