Angaben zur Professur

Lehrstuhl 

Professur A. Theriot

Typ 

Professur für Architektur und Entwurf

Standort 

HIL

Webseite 

www.theriot.arch.ethz.ch

Assistierende 

Marta Cassany, Oliviero Vitali

Kontakt E-Mail 

assistenz.theriot@arch.ethz.ch

Angaben zur Entwurfsklasse

Typ 

Entwurf V-IX

Thema 

The equipped environment

Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes 

For two centuries, architecture has accumulated answers. To comfort, air conditioning. To safety, sprinklers. To indoor climate, ventilation. To the envelope, an accumulation of components. The building has gradually become an assembly of technical responses to a multitude of constraints. This accumulation constitutes one of the great projects of modernity. Each innovation promised a safer, more comfortable, more efficient world. Heating, elevators, insulating glass, membranes, networks, control systems… These responses have profoundly transformed the way we inhabit. Their success has been such that they have become invisible. We no longer look at them. We take them for granted. Yet the questions they once answered are no longer the same. The answers are still there. The questions have changed. The point is neither to celebrate technology nor to condemn it. But it can no longer be conceived as an autonomous response. It must once again become a question for architecture. There are places where these responses remain invisible. And others where they appear in all their materiality. Schlieren is one of those places. West of Zurich, the metropolis ceases to stage its own image. It reveals how it works. The answers accumulated over two centuries of modernity compose a territory: infrastructures, networks, logistics platforms, technical buildings, productive activities. What elsewhere disappears behind façades becomes, here, the landscape itself. Schlieren is not the periphery of Zurich. It is its reverse side. A territory often regarded as generic suddenly reveals an extraordinary density of relationships, dependencies, conflicts, but also possibilities. Technical objects cease to be mere devices. They become actors within the territory. It is precisely here that architecture once again finds a field of action. Not by adding yet another object to the city. But by reinventing the relationships between technologies, infrastructures, landscapes, and forms of inhabitation. Text by Alexandre Theriot The beginnings of the broad reconfiguration of the built environment –from agriculture via the food industry to architecture, from household appliances to the city and countryside – can be traced back to the industrial revolution and its outcomes in the late 19th century. These reconfigurations brought a comprehensive redefinition of architecture and urban planning, and large-scale reallocations amongst the various practitioners and the users of the built environment, which can be traced at different levels: at a political level because this reconfiguration also represents a transfer in political responsibilities; at an urban-planning level, due to the fact that from then onwards the city becomes interconnected, not only over-ground but also underground, in a wide-ranging network of infrastructures; or at an architectural level, ranging from construction to infrastructure to the equipping of individual buildings with a series of apparatuses, transforming houses into genuine, contemporary “machines”. However, the reconfiguration of our environment is not only technical in nature. It does not only reflect the rationale of increasingly refined technological systems but also spans a discursive arc between contradictory notions: of comfort, security or hygiene on the one hand and disciplinary measures and control on the other. In the multiplication of small anonymous devices, apparatuses or elements in the course of modernity, the “dispersed”, “reduced” and “polyvalent” field of social practice appears at last to have found its material correlation. To analyse therefore the growing equipment of our environment from a merely technical perspective or on the contrary simply as signs or representations, will not do justice to the complex networks of actors involved, nor to their technical and material ingenuity. Only in taking the political nature of our equipped environment in consideration and in understanding its historical nature, will we be able to intervene in it in a meaningful way. In the first five weeks of the semester, we will collectively approach these concerns through reading and research. Reading will be conducted in three sessions within the studio, covering two selected texts per session. The bibliography will first allow to apprehend the technical object as a notion in relation to architecture, then understand its belonging in a wider social and technical milieu and finally question its validity and measure its consequences. Research will be conducted independently by the students, organized in the same groups as the studio. Review sessions will be held on Thursdays in Hönggerberg to follow up specifically on research development. Based on an object addressed in the studio, students will set off to gather primary and secondary materials from appropriate sources, then arrange them in a meaningful sequence and present them into a script, the premise of a cinematic visual essay. Text by Laurent Stadler

Thematische und methodische Schwerpunkte 

Entwurf, Konstruktion, Handwerk, Visualisierungen

Lernziele 

Ways of working This semester, the studio and the seminar are one and the same. Research does not precede the project. The project does not come to conclude the research. They move forward together. Every project becomes a research. Every research becomes a project. We will work through shifts: from image to object, from object to matter, from matter to territory, from territory to architecture. With each shift, the question changes. Image, object, text, archive, matter, construction, territory, program, structure, economy do not constitute separate fields. The project begins when they enter into relation. The semester is organized into 3 chapters. Not 3 exercises, but 3 states of a single project. I. MYTHOLOGIES Building a research. II. FINDING FREEDOMS Finding where to act. III. BINDING FRAGMENTS Building architecture.

LV-Nr. des Entwurfs 

052-1113-26

Unterrichts-sprache 

English

Arbeitsweise 

Group work only

Daten Zwischenkritiken 

14. October, 18. November

Datum Schlusskritik 

16. December

Einführungs-veranstaltung 

15. September, 9:30, ONA

Zusätzliche Kosten 

CHF 200 (Schätzung, ohne allfällige Kosten für Modellbau und Seminarwoche)

Verfügbare Plätze 

42

Plakat des Entwurfs-programmes 

Plakat ansehen (PDF Datei)