Kerberos

Kerberos in lace dress

The structure of the Winterthur waste incineration plant is an urban colossus. For safety reasons, this colossus needs a fence. The design "Kerberos" breaks away from the pure functionality of the fence. It captures the rational large-scale form of the waste machine in a fragile hem.

Kerberos, the hellhound of Greek mythology, is the gatekeeper who guards the threshold to the fiery hell. Whoever and whatever enters the realm ruled by him runs the risk of being devoured. The all-consuming fire of the incinerator remains invisible behind the structure; the power of Kerberos manifests itself at the transition: like the textile border ennobling a plain dress, the fence lines the huge complex. Reinforcing mesh, a material as archaic as it is pragmatic, forms a rigid yet fragile grid. The steel mesh was transformed into a three-dimensional structure in an elaborate deformation process in sheet metal folding machines and finally on site by an excavator. The originally mundane everyday object becomes a filigree structure of astonishing lightness and elegance through the application of force, which transparently delimits the huge complex. Compared to the unmanageable mass of the building volumes, the hem is a vanishingly small, delicate, proverbially flimsy element. For the passer-by, however, who moves close to it on the way to the station, it becomes a sculptural counterpart that sometimes plays around him, envelops him, curves towards him. The almost transparent, but through its deformation corporeal fence allies itself in its presence and scale with the passer-by.