CHANGING ROOM
2026, BASEL
Intervention for After Hours

A 1954 villa sits above a strip of the Rhine River in Basel. Though this beach is public land, every route to it passes through private property. For a public exhibition held in the villa in the months before its demolition, Changing Room opportunistically transformed one domestic space into a changing room for river bathers.

Over three months and with the collaboration of over twenty individuals, the room was stripped of non-structural material and its facade was opened towards the river. Earth excavated from the remains of an artificial rock bath became a new ground. The villa’s existing plumbing lines were redeployed as a sink and an outdoor shower for collective use.

Throughout the month of June, a house awaiting demolition became a temporary public amenity: a setting for unexpected, intimate, and jubilant forms of collective occupation.

During construction, however, the shared path from the villa to the river was deliberately obstructed by a neighboring owner. Following unsuccessful mediation attempts, the project left the room: a 40-meter tube extended the villa’s water line over a retaining wall to a shower operated from the beach below. The intervention neither restored access nor resolved the conflict between public land and private ownership. Instead, it bypasses it infrastructurally, redirecting private resources toward collective use. Private and public realms are connected not through access, but through infrastructure.