Nagelhaus

The term Nagelhaus (nail house) was coined in China and refers to homes whose owners refuse to move in order to make room for commercial building projects. The most famous case of a nail house is the home of an elderly couple in Chongqing, who had declined selling their house to the developers of a shopping mall for two years. In 2008 Thomas Demand and London-based architectural company Caruso St John won a competition to redesign the Escher Weiss-square in Zürich; their proposal was the reconstruction of the famous Chinese nail house as a pavilion on the Swiss square. The project was ultimately stopped by a people’s referendum. The gravures visualizing the proposal, created by Norwegian engraver and artist Martin Mörck and printed by BORCH Editions, were part of the original winning proposal.