Angaben zur Professur

Lehrstuhl 

Professur A. Puigjaner

Typ 

Professur für Architektur und Entwurf

Standort 

HIL

Webseite 

www.puigjaner.arch.ethz.ch

Assistierende 

Lisa Maillard, Paule Perron

Kontakt E-Mail 

perron@arch.ethz.ch

Angaben zur Entwurfsklasse

Typ 

Entwurf V-IX

Thema 

(UN)FAMILIAR STRUCTURES

Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes 

During the autumn semester 2026, the Architecture and Care design studio will explore how architecture can support diverse forms of kinship and social reproduction beyond the normative model of the nuclear family. Rather than assuming the family as the natural unit through which care, intimacy, and reproduction are organised, the studio will investigate the spatial conditions and public infrastructures that enable care to be shared across broader networks of interdependence. The studio will explore the physicality of these (un)familiar structures, asking how structural systems, material assemblies, spatial organisations, and architectural elements can embody and sustain alternative forms of living together. Within late capitalism, the nuclear family has become the privileged social unit through which reproduction and care are organised. Primarily structured around binary gender roles and reinforced by political, legal, and economic systems, it has historically contributed to the privatisation of care and to the unequal distribution of reproductive labour. The studio understands the scope of this structure beyond the merely sociopolitical and economical, to include the material and spatial. The architectural manifestation of the nuclear family, such as the separation between the reproductive and private domestic sphere and the productive public sphere, has perpetuated normative reproduction practices, and the discrimination against non-normative bodies, subjectivities, and forms of kinship. In Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis traces the meaning of “abolition” back to the German Aufhebung, a term that means “lifting up, destroying, preserving, and radically transforming, all at once”. It should be understood as a world-building exercise, one that constructs a future in which what is to be abolished has become unnecessary. Similarly, this course explores abolition as a constructive practice for imagining alternative futures in which the family, as we know it, has become obsolete. Building on family abolition, gender, queer, and crip studies, this studio will explore the possibilities of non-normative and more egalitarian forms of kinship through the design of public institutions and infrastructures. Looking at the different elements of care and reproductive labour, from child-rearing and caring for those with disabilities to fertilisation treatments, the objective will be to design institutions and spaces that promote forms of communal kinship beyond the nuclear family. A critical examination of the spatial conditions of familial reproduction practices, from breastfeeding and surrogacy, to sexual practices, elderly care, adoption or child-rearing, will underpin a design course that aims to look at care structures from an intersectional point of view. The projects will envision alternative architectures for Zürich in which care and reproductive labour are addressed as expanded social practices, supported by mutual and transversal forms of dependence and kinship. The site for our institutions will be the Parkhaus Hardturm in Zürich, constructed between 1984 and 1987 by Hubacher & Issler Architekten. Addressing architecture from the urban to the body, the course will examine how architecture shapes relationships of care, intimacy, and reproduction. Students will develop architectural proposals that challenge spatial structures based on exclusion, isolation, and normative domesticity, while exploring forms of coexistence that embrace diversity, interdependence, and collective responsibility. We will understand dependency as a positive relationship, and propose programmes and spaces that support sharing reproductive labour in transversal ways. This realignment can contribute to generating new forms of balance, ones in which we stop “caring for” and start “caring with” as a form of interdependence. We will look at the body, its spaces, contexts, and rituals as a starting point for an architectural and aesthetic proposal at multiple scales. The students will be asked to design avoiding prevalent forms of spatial oppression and exploitation, and instead, explore the paths of otherness, wildness, diversity, and complexity. The final objective is to propose institutions providing inclusive spaces for reproductive futures. To look at the nuclear family through an abolitionist perspective, we need to elaborate on the politics of reproductive labour and the way in which they contribute to making this historically specific social unit appear natural and indispensable to capitalist societies. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici describes how the the shift from feudalism to capitalism from the fourteenth century lead to the enclosure of the commons, which forced men into wage labour and in turn led to the feminisation of unremunerated reproductive labour and the widespread subjugation of women more generally. More recently, in They Call It Love, Alva Gotby has defined reproductive labour as “the work that goes into maintaining and replacing the labour force and ensuring people’s wellbeing”. From this perspective, contemporary societies are still structured by the historically gendered division between productive and reproductive labour organised by capitalism: while one is directly linked to the creation of economic value, the other sustains the bodies and social relations upon which that production depends and remains largely unpaid and devalued. This binary dichotomy is deeply gendered and intersects with other forms of oppression like racism, ableism, classism, homophobia or transphobia, as well as being mediated through various techniques, from architecture to medical practices. Architecture, as a social technology, is not neutral. It contributes to the inscription of such discriminatory practices in space and bodies. More specifically, the stabilisation of the nuclear family at the end of the nineteenth century was both a social and a spatial process. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, Henry Roberts presented Model Houses for Families, a social housing prototype aimed to be replicated for organising workers’ neighbourhoods in the “modern city”. Its floor plan functioned not only as an architectural layout but also as a social diagram, organising the hierarchies, divisions of labour and domestic relations that constitute the nuclear family as the primary unit of social reproduction. It materialised the dependence on productive labour in the factories outside the home, on the privatised sphere of reproductive labour, and the gendered division of labour that sustained it. This typological housing design became a dominant model for twentieth-century housing production and largely remains so today. The design of domestic space, public institutions, and urban environments continues to participate in the reproduction of this order. Architecture is therefore implicated in the marginalisation of women, queer and trans people, non-binary people, racialised communities, people living outside the nuclear family, and other forms of non-normative bodies and subjectivities. In this design course, we will imagine architectures that support non-normative practices at different stages of reproductive life, from fertility treatments to upbringing. Speculating with new programmes and institutions, we will design collective spaces that promote and visualise shared forms of reproductive care. In the present context, the division between productive and reproductive labour, the spaces it takes place in, and the bodies that carry it out, are once again being reshaped. The limits of the domestic are blurring, the home is no longer necessarily a space for care; instead, it is a transient, productive, and networked space. On the other hand, public and collective spaces can shelter former domestic activities and become spaces for care through different bodies (human and non-human), technologies, and spatial strategies operating across multiple scales. Throughout the course, we will explore the spatial conditions of the labour required to sustain and reproduce life itself, considering reproduction as both a spatial and social process.

Thematische und methodische Schwerpunkte 

Entwurf, Konstruktion, Handwerk, Präsentation

Lernziele 

RAISING CRITICAL ARCHITECTURAL POSITIONS Formulating clear and precise questions, using abstract ideas to interpret information, considering diverse points of view, reaching well-reasoned conclusions, and testing alternative outcomes. Performing qualitative and quantitative architectural research and translating it into an architectural language. Gathering, assessing, recording, and comparatively evaluating relevant information and performance in order to support conclusions. DESIGNING SOCIAL IMPACT Designing responding to territories of care and their characteristics, including urban context and historical fabric, soil, topography, ecology, climate, economy… Using formal, organisational, social, and environmental principles and informing two- and three-dimensional design. Understanding construction systems and their coherent formalisation. Considering the environmental impact and the reuse of the design. COMMUNICATING ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS Writing, performing, and speaking effectively about an architectural design, using representational media appropriate for both the profession and for a wider audience. Making clear architectural drawings and constructing models at different scales that illustrate and communicate an architectural research and design technically, experientially, and aesthetically.

LV-Nr. des Entwurfs 

052-1153-26

Unterrichts-sprache 

English

Arbeitsweise 

Nur Gruppenarbeit

Daten Zwischenkritiken 

14. October, 18. November

Datum Schlusskritik 

15. December

Einführungs-veranstaltung 

15. September, 9:30, HIL E 70.5

Zusätzliche Kosten 

CHF 100 (Schätzung, ohne allfällige Kosten für Modellbau und Seminarwoche)

Verfügbare Plätze 

42

Plakat des Entwurfs-programmes 

Plakat ansehen (PDF Datei)