Look for a broad plaza coated in red rubber granulate, with rounded built-in seating and cloud-like light bubbles hanging above it.
This is the Stadtlounge, better known as the Red Square... because St. Gallen decided a public plaza should feel less like a passageway and more like a living room that spilled into the city. In the spring of two thousand and five, Raiffeisen finished the last stage of its redevelopment here in the Bleicheli quarter. To give the new district an identity, the bank launched a design competition. Architect Carlos Martinez and artist Pipilotti Rist won it, and together they turned most of Raiffeisenplatz into this very red experiment.
Rist and Martinez imagined a public lounge dipped entirely in red, like a carpet unrolled across about four thousand six hundred square meters. The surface is a rubbery plastic granulate, tiny colored particles bound together, and it wraps not just the ground but benches, sculptures, and even a fountain. If you glance at your screen, image one shows how completely that red surface takes over the site.
The clever part is that the square is organized like a giant lounge: reception, cloakroom, foyer, café. A foyer, by the way, is simply an entrance hall. The zones slide into one another instead of ending in hard lines, so the whole place feels open, slightly surreal, and oddly domestic. On the app, image four makes that flow easier to read from above.
For Rist, that mattered. She liked spaces where people could spend time together and move through art, not just stare at it. She had explored that idea earlier in a work called The Room, where she played with turning private space into something public. Here, the art becomes democratic... a place anyone can occupy. Not everyone loved the practical side, though: the coarse red surface faded, cracked, and dented, so the city eventually needed a maintenance plan and even a special cleaning vehicle. Still, the project went on to win design awards in two thousand and eight and again in two thousand and fourteen.
It is a rare square that tries to be both artwork and furniture, and somehow gets away with it.
The area stays active from around eleven in the morning until after midnight, with a moderate price level if you stop nearby.
Take one more look around, and when you're ready, we can continue toward the Textile Museum.
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