Imagine the following planning task: A lively cultural, creative-economic and social center is desired that enables all conceivable cultural formats, attracts a wide variety of people every day, exerts an inspiring effect on visitors and becomes a new urban hotspot. How could this be achieved? With a new building, a preceding architectural competition and a professional board of trustees for the operation? The described result arose from the re-use of a dilapidated building.

‍

Prestige thanks to color ‍

‍

The Biregg indoor swimming pool in Lucerne was opened in 1969 - a typical building of architectural modernism, built by the local architect couple Lis and Adolf Ammann. Since 2013, the indoor swimming pool has been used temporarily under the title "Neubad", because the year before a new municipal indoor swimming pool had been opened on the Allmend. It remains to be seen when the wrecking ball will strike. The plan is to build non-profit housing on this site one day. The planning required for this may still take years. The Netzwerk Neubad association is taking advantage of this gap. It was founded when the baths came to an end. Its concept: to use the indoor swimming pool for "cultural and creative purposes. The association originally received a limited contract until2017 and started operations in September 2013. This includes: a restaurant, rooms for cultural and social events, coworking space and studios for startup companies, creative professionals, NGOs, studios, urban gardening and projects such as Repair Café, Neubad Lectures and much more. The centerpiece of the building is the tiled pool, 25 meters long, 15 meters wide. In this atmospherically unique space, concerts, readings, theater, seminars and even the "Kitchen battle", a non-profit competition of professional cooking teams for the benefit of projects in crisis areas, take place. At the beginning, the association invested half a million francs and an additional 8,000 hours of volunteer work. The commitment paid off - the operation runs excellently: More than 300 events take place annually, around 120,000 people visit the place, more than 2 million francs are generated, and more than 40 people are provided with a livelihood - all this without subsidies until recently. In the meantime, the city extended the period of use until 2023.

‍

Buildings as spaces of possibility‍.

‍

What explains this success? Basically, you can think of a vacant building as a "possibility space." And possibility spaces inspire people to ideas, fantasies and action. From the French philosopher Bruno Latour, who founded the "actor-network theory," comes the thesis that things can also be social actors. If there is any truth to this theory, it certainly applies to such buildings that are to be repurposed. They attract people with ideas and tempt them to sound out the space, to test it out and to exhaust it. This was the case with the Neubad in Lucerne. The Neubad network, a broad alliance of people and organizations from various areas of society that was formed in response to a call for proposals from the city of Lucerne, was guided by two basic ideas: a "culture of openness" and "inspiration through diversity. Two mottos with deeper meaning. In the working areas, the studios and the coworking space, the operating team has its offices, the headquarters of the "B-Sides Festival", the "Association of Doctors against Nuclear War", the water NGO "Viva con Agua". Designers, photographers, artisans, graphic artists, tailors, agricultural architects, IT and marketing companies use shared workspaces. New contacts are constantly being made. In the bistro, ideas are exchanged and interdisciplinary projects are launched. The variety of formats in the pool and in the basement club (the former boiler room) ensures that the bistro is always frequented by different people - a guarantee that one particular scene does not dominate the building. And whoever has been in once will come back again. It is probably not only due to the building that an unbelievably committed and motivated operating and catering team, as well as an imaginative management, continue to provide the house with thrust. And the fact that volunteers continue to perform certain jobs under the name "lifeguard" probably also has to do with the exciting environment and the opportunity to participate in a unique project. But it is also a fact that the high maintenance costs of the dilapidated building on the one hand and the goal of offering payable jobs, gastronomic and cultural offers on the other hand also lead to economic constraints. Wages are modest, human resources are scarce. Thus, it is not only a blessing but also a curse of good utilization when the staff has to clean up the legacy of a big event on Saturday night so that the flea market can start on time on Sunday morning.

‍

Permanent use?

‍

‍Interim use has its own dynamic. Here, ideas are implemented in the knowledge that it will one day be over again. This finiteness creates intensity. In a short time, the Neubad has become a crystallization point for Lucerne's cultural scene, a place that generates impulses and makes the city more attractive and more lively - for both the creators and the visitors. Of course, this arouses a desire for the long term - many say they could no longer imagine city life without Neubad. But if it were a permanent after-use, the same intensity would probably not have developed. And, contradictory as it may sound, permanence would not be sustainable in this case. The building was built before the oil shock of the 1970s, with huge single-glazed windows and a massive oil-fired heating system. Energy retrofitting here would be feasible only with a disproportionate investment of funds and would not be economically viable. The dilemma between the worthiness of preservation and the popularity of a building on the one hand, and the necessity of getting away from fossil fuels on the other hand, is openly revealed here.Personal details: Alex Willener is a lecturer and researcher at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and, with his company SONARA, works independently as a project manager and consultant in the field of social and creative urban development. He is also active as a practitioner, activist and initiator in urban and community development - for example, as a co-founder and board member of the Neubad network in Lucerne for several years.

‍

‍