Portrait of a park: Zurich’s innovative vertical garden, MFO-Park

This article is part of a Zurich guide by FT Globetrotter

It’s a clear crisp morning in Zurich and I’m meeting a contact for work. Coming from the late winter darkness of London, I am mystified by the hyperreal light.

My contact, an expat and fellow Brit, suggests I acclimate with a visit to a “vertical park made by architects from the bones of an old engineering factory.” He tells me how she once stumbled upon it, and it struck her as a microcosm of Switzerland’s progressive approach to urban regeneration. We can look over the rooftops – one of the best ways to orient yourself as a newcomer to any city – if we climb the park’s tall, empty stairs.

MFO-Park is located in the commercial and northern suburb of Oerlikon. We find it in James-Joyce-Strasse after searching a series of silent squares. The street is named after one of Zurich’s favorite immigrants: Joyce spent World War I in exile in the city, wrote extensively about Odysseushis 1922 masterpiece, here, and died in Zurich in 1941 (although not in this part of the city).

At first glance, the park looks more like an abandoned construction site than a public utility: a sort of open-air atrium the size of an entire city block, with double walls and an open-grid roof, a steel mesh something like rough scaffolding. .

The net is woven with trellisted plants—today, mostly bare, deadly-looking vines—woven into and trained to climb the walls of the structure. But it’s February. Upon closer inspection it turns out that they are not dead at all, but sprinkled with the almost luminous green of the first buds.

I am stunned by the scale and geometry (the structure is 17 meters high, 35 meters wide and 100 meters long) and by the lattice of moving shadows that its steel skeleton casts on the ground.

“As architects, we rarely succeed in building parks,” says Oliver S Gilbert of Burckhardt + Partners, who with landscape architects Raderschallpartner conceived and led the MFO-Park project as a “living” structure. I called Gilbert when I got home to London to find out more. “Mostly, buildings are finished things. But this, over the years, grows and grows, ”he says.

The deindustrialization of the late 20th century gave Gilbert, who was then in his 20s and barely qualified, that chance. He and his team began work in 1998, when the Zurich government launched design competitions to redevelop the Oerlikon industrial area and transform the area’s former factories and workshops into a new commercial and residential district.

Commuters and locals would require dynamic and stimulating public spaces for health, rest and leisure. And so part of the former Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (Machine Factory Oerlikon) site, which built electric locomotives in the 19th and 20th centuries, was among five “free space” parks intended for use by those who lived and worked in the new quarter.

What Gilbert and his team conceived was “a ‘park house’ — a park on the ground, with different levels like a house,” he says. “We wanted to remember and honor the size of [the site] when it contained engines and boats. Even if the young people who use it today don’t remember that time, we used its industrial language for their park”.

At one time, long before it opened in 2002, the entire site was littered with construction debris, sand and ash. Gilbert recalls a long process of decontaminating heavily polluted land before work could begin.

More than 20 years later, on summer days the steel walls disappear behind wisteria, clematis and roses (there are around 100 plant species in all). The effect, Gilbert says, is intended as shelter and shade, the shielding of the city with fleeting scents and ever-changing plays of shadow and light.

“If it was in the center of the city, this park would be overused,” he says. “In Oerlikon you can still find a quiet moment. It’s still exactly what we hoped it would be.”

Perhaps MFO-Park’s greatest gift to Zurich employees is its lack of prescriptive purpose. This is intentional. It is, the architects say, “open for any use”.

In the summer, the sprung ground level, which contains less than usual clutter such as benches and tables, is ample enough for sports and games. Open-air film screenings, theatre, concerts and even variety shows are occasionally staged, which the architects say are reminiscent of Zurich’s park theaters of the Baroque era. The upper levels of the park function in the same way as private opera boxes, offering an elevated view of the spectacle below.

All year round, it should be perfect for an idle hour (perhaps with a book that requires quiet, uninterrupted concentration, such as odysseus).

On the day of my visit, the benches, stairs and ornamental pool on the ground floor of the MFO-Park are deserted, although this does not reflect its popularity: it is 11am on a weekday and 2C.

As my contact and I clatter up the stairs – delirious at being supported only by an open net 10 meters above the ground – we find a small group of teenagers frolicking on one of the sunny decks. Suddenly they fell silent, staring at us from under hoods and pom-pom hats, their dying chatter leaving curls of icy breath in the air. Today, the city’s industrial past has been reclaimed by young Zurich residents. Website; Directions

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