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On Walkeweg, one of Basel's largest development sites, Parabase builds Elementa from prefabricated concrete elements salvaged from a demolished parking garage.
The Walkeweg site sits at the edge of Dreispitz, Wolf, and Irène Zurkinden-Platz in Basel, one of the canton's largest development areas. A phased program will eventually house over 1,000 residents, combining affordable apartments, an elementary school, a kindergarten, and a migration center. Parabase won an international competition for the second phase: 120 affordable units plus integrated services, delivered by 2026 under the project name Elementa.
The project's core move is material reuse at a scale unprecedented in Switzerland. The entire structural and facade system derives from the deconstruction of the Lysbüchel parking garage, a postwar infrastructure building scheduled for demolition. Rather than crushing the concrete for aggregate, Parabase extracts intact prefabricated elements: columns, beams, ribbed ceiling panels, and wall sections. These retain their original form, their wear, their industrial character.
What arrives on site reads as raw material: weathered panels bearing faint traces of parking signage and graffiti, columns still marked with the red navigation bands that once guided drivers through the structure. Parabase does not conceal this origin. Instead, they work with it, arranging the components into a facade system that registers as both industrial and domestic. Ribbed horizontal panels stack between vertical mullions. Corrugated metal overhangs provide shade. Warm wood-framed windows punch through the gray.
The strategy saves an estimated one million kilograms of CO2 emissions by avoiding the production of new concrete. Beyond embodied carbon, the development operates without fossil fuels. Rooftop photovoltaic panels visible across the complex generate on-site energy. District-scale infrastructure handles heating and cooling.
The result sits somewhere between salvage yard and housing block, a new typology for circular construction. Elementa does not romanticize its materials or pretend they are anything other than what they are: parking garage components given a second life. The project's honesty becomes its character.
