Cooling Commons: A Shady Manual
Zarah Fahrni
Public Projects is a collaboration founded by architects Laura Bruder and Zarah Fahrni,
working between Zurich, Paris, Stuttgart, and Cairo. Educated at ETH Zurich, TU Delft, and
EPFL respectively, they share a deep commitment to spatial justice. Their practice engages in
architectural strategies that activate the built environment through collaboration, reuse, and
participatory processes, focusing on shared access and the negotiation of space. Grounded,
playful, and politically aware, their work operates at the intersection of research, design, and s
Laura explores context-sensitive transformation strategies and performative approaches to
reactivate spatial and cultural narratives. She is founder of her studio LAB, focusing on adaptive
reuse and teaches at the transformation chair of Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design.
Working across architecture, scenography, and writing, her work investigates how minimal, site-
specific interventions can engage with existing spatial and social dynamics, shift perception, and
enable collective appropriation. She has collaborated with EM2N, Dogma, and Schmidlin, and is
particularly interested in combining critical research with experiential outcomes.
Zarah’s focus lies at the intersection of socio-political and economic dynamics and spatial
production. She is a strong advocate for bottom-up processes and appropriable spaces,
directing her practice toward resource-constrained contexts. She is currently based in Paris,
pursuing a post-master’s degree in Recherches en architecture, and in Zurich, where she
practices as an architect, after five years as a project lead at WALDRAP. Her recent
collaboration with CLUSTER in Cairo on heat-mitigation strategies reflects her interest in urban
resilience and climate-adaptive design.
Heat is one of the defining phenomena of our time, simultaneously vital and life threatening. As global temperatures rise, their effects manifest spatially: in how we move, gather, and inhabit our shared spaces. And while much of the architectural response has focused on insulation, energy efficiency, or high-tech climate control, the act of seeking shade remains one of the most elemental spatial strategies.
This proposal suggests a research-led project that investigates how shade, as typology and movement pattern, can support liveable public spaces in a warming world. We begin with the Mediterranean region, where people have long coped with heat through architectural and informal strategies, from courtyards and arcades to shifted rhythms and communal adaptation. We aim to learn from existing practices and reinterpret them as spatial and embodied knowledge for present and future climates.
The outcome is a manual of spatial strategies for shared shade, gathering, comparing, and visualizing techniques that range from urban design to everyday tactics. Rather than a technical guideline, it is conceived as a democratic and community-oriented handbook, accessible to both planning authorities and individuals alike. Alongside fieldwork and mapping, the manual may be tested and applied through a site-specific intervention, for example in Pristina during the LINA Forum, adapting collected knowledge to local spatial conditions.
In doing so, we ask: How does heat change the way we value, use, and design space? How can shading practices become tools of social as well as spatial resilience and public imagination? And how can we reframe environmental response as a collective spatial culture?
