Angaben zur Professur

Lehrstuhl 

Gastdozentur A. Solanellas Terres / M. Meister / C. Van Noten

Typ 

Gastdozentur Entwurf

Standort 

AGS

Webseite 

arch.ethz.ch/departement/faculty/visiting-faculty.html

Assistierende 

Amelie Nguyen, Francesco Colli

Kontakt E-Mail 

nguyenam@ethz.ch

Angaben zur Entwurfsklasse

Typ 

Entwurf V-IX

Thema 

Soft Permanence

Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes 

What if the most permanent architecture is the one that can be most easily reused? Our investigation into what permanence in architecture might mean begins with a simple observation: the materials we build with are increasingly already around us. Rather than being newly extracted, they are recovered from the existing fabric of our cities. As the logics of extraction shift, architectural practice is fundamentally redefined. With the notion of Soft Permanence, we propose that buildings are not fixed endpoints but temporary resting places for materials within a longer chain of transformations. In Switzerland, buildings barely fifty years old are routinely declared obsolete, demolished, and absorbed into the material waste stream. In this final semester of our guest studio, we ask how existing buildings can remain part of the urban fabric by becoming sources for future architectures rather than construction waste. The semester starts with a selection of buildings in Zurich scheduled for demolition. These buildings become our urban mines. Through surveying, documenting, and developing strategies for dismantling, we transform existing structures into a catalogue of reusable building components. The process of disassembly becomes a form of architectural analysis, revealing not only how buildings come apart but also the latent potential embedded within them. Your catalogue becomes the point of departure for design. Rather than starting from abstraction, projects develop inductively, from fragment to whole. The sourced elements are not abstract quantities awaiting manufacture but tangible materials to be visited, measured, and reimagined in new constellations. Designing in this way reverses the familiar process, grounding architectural decisions in the realities of available materials. This semester's task is to design collective housing along the railway and motorway corridor on the western shore of Lake Zurich. Reused building components often come in unfamiliar sizes and dimensions, creating spatial possibilities that differ from conventional construction. Collective housing provides an ideal framework for exploring how these conditions can generate new forms of domestic space and shared living. Looking to Zurich's tradition of housing cooperatives, we will investigate how designing with a catalogue, and understanding buildings as temporary repositories of resources, can challenge established models of dwelling and support alternative ways of living together. Guided by the idea of thinking through making, the semester adopts a hands-on approach. Model making, material investigations, and the construction of mock-ups will be central tools throughout the design process.

Thematische und methodische Schwerpunkte 

Entwurf, Konstruktion, Handwerk

Lernziele 

_Developing a demolition and disassembly concept to identify and extract reusable building components for future design projects _Designing with a catalogue of reused elements _Using limitations and material constraints as productive design drivers _Exploring principles of Design for Disassembly (DfD) _Developing typological design strategies and architectural plans _Exploring alternative forms of living and collective housing _Critically reflecting on the notion of permanence in architecture _Developing skills in model making and 1:1 prototyping

LV-Nr. des Entwurfs 

052-0661-26

Unterrichts-sprache 

English

Arbeitsweise 

Nur Gruppenarbeit

Daten Zwischenkritiken 

13.10./24.11.

Datum Schlusskritik 

15.12./16.12.

Einführungs-veranstaltung 

Tuesday 15 September, 9:30 am, Atelier Gisel

Zusätzliche Kosten 

CHF 80 (Schätzung, ohne allfällige Kosten für Modellbau und Seminarwoche)

Verfügbare Plätze 

24

Plakat des Entwurfs-programmes 

Plakat ansehen (PDF Datei)