Angaben zur Professur

Lehrstuhl 

Professur A. Theriot

Typ 

Professur für Architektur und Entwurf

Standort 

HIL

Webseite 

www.theriot.arch.ethz.ch

Assistierende 

Oliviero Vitali, Marta Cassany

Kontakt E-Mail 

assistenz.theriot@arch.ethz.ch

Angaben zur Entwurfsklasse

Typ 

Entwurf V-IX

Thema 

UNINHABITABLE

Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes 

UNINHABITABLE To inhabit is not self-evident.
 To inhabit is a conquest, a compromise, sometimes a form of violence. Contemporary architecture has largely been built on the idea that the world must be made habitable: to insulate, protect, temper, normalize.
 But today, this ambition is wearing thin in the face of territories that resist, not by lack, but by excess. Too much noise
 Too many flows
 Too many regulations
 Too much pollution
 Too much cost
 Too much infrastructure
 Too much reality. The Uninhabitable studio does not seek to repair these situations.
It starts from the opposite premise: What if the inhabitable were precisely the place where architecture becomes necessary again? The inhabitable is not an empty space.
 It is a saturated territory: rails, cables, regulations, machines, rules, speeds, risks, contradictory temporalities.
 A territory that no longer tolerates ordinary inhabitation, yet produces, in return, exceptional conditions. In a city like Zurich, the inhabitable is rarely spectacular.
 It is discreet, technical, buried.
 It slips beneath railway lines, behind airport fences, into industrial interstices, along highway interchanges, above networks, in those places we pass through without ever stopping. These sites are considered unsuitable not by nature, but because they escape established categories.
 They are neither urban nor landscape.
 Neither public nor private.
 Neither built nor empty.
 Neither meant to last, nor meant to disappear. The studio is interested in these zones not to make them habitable, but to produce situations of exception within them:
 Architectures that do not promise comfort,
 That do not pacify their context,
 But that negotiate with it, exploit it, divert it, traverse it. This is not only about housing.
 It is about presence, use, occupation, coexistence with hostile or indifferent forces. To inhabit can be temporary, fragmented, conditional.
 To inhabit can mean working, waiting, storing, observing, repairing, filtering, monitoring, transforming. To inhabit can be a posture rather than a program. Infrastructures - railway, airport, energy, logistics, industrial - are not here nuisances to be avoided, but active environments.
 They produce intensities, rhythms, physical and regulatory constraints that force architecture to reposition itself:
 No longer as a stable object, but as a device.
 No longer as an autonomous form, but as an interface.   Architecture thus becomes a fragile, precise, situated machine.
 It does not seek to last forever, but to hold:
 To hold against noise,
 To hold against flows,
 To hold against regulations,
 To hold against the economy. The project is no longer an optimal answer, but a risky hypothesis.
 An attempt to make possible what seemed excluded.
 An exploration of limits, not to push them back, but to make them legible. Uninhabitable is an invitation to stop producing reassuring architectures
and to accept that the project begins where certainties collapse.

Thematische und methodische Schwerpunkte 

Entwurf, Konstruktion, Staedtebau, Landschaftsarchitektur, Handwerk, Visualisierungen

Lernziele 

METHODOLOGY The studio explores how economic requirements can be seized not as limitations, but as active drivers— transforming constraints into levers that generate qualities. These qualities may be tangible or intangible, prosaic or poetic, stable or unstable, general or circumstantial. What matters is that they emerge from economic conditions themselves, often operating far from conventional rationality. From this tension arise forms of generosity-productive “excesses” that give a place its strength, character, and singularity. The semester is structured around three successive chapters: Chapter 1: Mythology Constructing narratives, imaginaries, and founding myths as project material. Chapter 2: Finding freedoms Identifying margins of manoeuvre within economic, technical, and regulatory constraints. Chapter 3: Binding fragments Assembling disparate elements—spatial, material, programmatic—into a coherent architectural proposition. PROJECT SITES Zurich INTEGRATED WORKSHOPS Chloé Delarue (Artist) Francesco Clerici (Filmmaker) TECHNICAL INPUTS Structure (Jacqueline Pauli) Façade and envelope (Gontran Dufour) With additional external experts from related fields.

LV-Nr. des Entwurfs 

052-1152-26

Unterrichts-sprache 

English

Arbeitsweise 

Group work only

Daten Zwischenkritiken 

Datum Schlusskritik 

Einführungs-veranstaltung 

Tuesday 17.02.26, 09:30h - ONA studio space (ground floor) Neunbrunnenstrasse 50, 8050 Zürich

Zusätzliche Kosten 

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

Verfügbare Plätze 

42

Plakat des Entwurfs-programmes 

Plakat ansehen (PDF Datei)