Angaben zur Professur

Lehrstuhl 

Professur D. Mesa Molina

Typ 

Professur für Architektur und Konstruktion

Standort 

HIL

Webseite 

www.mesa-molina.arch.ethz.ch

Assistierende 

Mingyue Zhang, Marcela Lino, Ludwig Albert, Luca Mostarda, Alicja Prusinska, Fabian Tobias Reiner, Lida Freudenreich

Kontakt E-Mail 

bachelor.mesa@arch.ethz.ch

Angaben zur Entwurfsklasse

Typ 

Entwurf III+IV

Thema 

ON SITE OFF SITE - From Source to Shelter to Settlement

Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes 

Architecture is never static. Buildings weather, materials travel and age, climates fluctuate, lives change, and structures are maintained, altered, replaced, or eventually dismantled. Yet architecture is still often conceived as a fixed and finished object. This leads to the studio´s central premise: if architecture is never static, construction cannot simply be understood as the means for making it permanent. Construction must instead be treated as design—a way of conceiving how architecture comes together, evolves, and comes apart. Designing for change has particular urgency today. Climate instability, housing insecurity, dynamic household structures, increased mobility, shifting patterns of work, and unequal access to land and resources demand architecture capable of responding to changing needs without continual demolition, replacement, and renewed extraction. Adaptability and reversibility are therefore not secondary technical qualities, but essential strategies for extending the useful life of buildings, reducing their material and environmental costs, and supporting more diverse ways of living. Rather than resisting movement, the studio asks how architecture can be designed to embrace it from the outset. Joints, materials, spaces, services, and structures are investigated as parts of an evolving system, capable of accommodating different uses and conditions across time and place—from sourcing and assembly to adaptation, disassembly, and reuse. Across the year, we will investigate these questions through one of architecture’s most essential forms: the shelter. Returning to shelter allows us to strip architecture back to its fundamentals and reconsider what is truly necessary. It invites us to reduce the superfluous—not as an exercise in austerity, but as a way of making architecture more precise, accessible, and resource-conscious. Here, shelter is not treated as a fixed type or a nostalgic origin, but as a concentrated field of investigation through which students can examine how architecture supports life, moderates climate, brings together materials from different sources and trajectories, and establishes a relationship with the ground and with time. The year moves from shelter to settlement, from the scale of the individual and small group to collective life in the city—from OFF SITE to ON SITE. The first semester asks students to formulate a contemporary shelter capable of moving, adapting, being assembled and disassembled, while maintaining a light physical and ecological footprint. The second transfers this intelligence to a specific context in Zürich, where architecture must respond to density, regulation, shared infrastructure, long-term urban transformation, and the urgent need for affordable housing. The studio will invite students to engage architecture through hands-on, iterative design processes grounded in experimentation and critical reflection. Throughout the year, The Workshop (C45.1) will act as our laboratory—a place where ideas are tested through making, construction is investigated directly, and iteration turns observation into architectural knowledge. KIT OF PARTS PART I: Table Constructing a common ground The semester begins with the collective act of construction. Working in groups, students construct their own studio space, starting with the tables that will support studio work, discussions, model making, exhibitions, and reviews throughout the year. The table is treated as a first architectural system: a structure that establishes dimensions, distributes loads, organises bodies, accommodates different uses, and creates a shared territory. Students work with reused or surplus materials and reversible connections. They must respond to what is available, test structural behaviour at full scale, and refine the quality of joints through direct making. The exercise establishes the studio’s working culture: responsibility for materials, collaboration, improvisation, precise construction, documentation, maintenance, and adaptation. PART II: Catalogue An atlas as a shared body of knowledge The semester continues with a collective investigation of precedents across different periods, cultures, climates, and construction traditions. The focus is on architectures that establish precise relations between inhabitation, environment, material, movement, assembly, and time: nomadic and seasonal shelters, demountable structures, compact dwellings, temporary institutions, and systems capable of repair, relocation, or repeated use. Each student analyses one precedent from a curated set through a common framework, making projects comparable while preserving their differences. Drawings, environmental diagrams, material maps, logistical studies, assembly sequences, and physical fragments reveal how architecture operates beyond appearance. Individual investigations are assembled into a shared catalogue that becomes an active design instrument for Part III, enabling comparison and exchange. PART III: Archetype A shelter for the contemporary nomad The final block asks students to formulate a contemporary shelter archetype. Working in groups, students define a specific inhabitant or small group, a way of living, an environmental condition, and a duration. They then develop a micro-architecture in which spatial experience, environmental performance, material choice, construction, and lifecycle form one coherent proposition. The shelter must be designed as a real, inhabitable, and constructible project, but it should also operate critically. It must also be capable of being unbuilt: its structure and enclosure should anticipate inspection, maintenance, replacement, disassembly, and relocation or reuse. The project may question conventional assumptions about comfort, ownership, privacy, mobility, permanence, domestic labour, or resource use, but it must remain precise about what it protects, what it exposes, what it shares, what it consumes, and what it leaves behind.

Thematische und methodische Schwerpunkte 

Entwurf, Konstruktion, Handwerk, Visualisierungen

Lernziele 

Throughout this studio, students will be learn to: - Observe, look at the world with curiosity and openness, questioning conventions. - Balance hands-on, practical experimentation with critical, theoretical reflection to inform holistic and thoughtful design. - Work across scales — from detail to territory. - Explore the material and elemental foundations of architecture, connecting design to natural processes. - Engage nature and industry as collaborators. Integrate time, adaptability, and resilience into architectural thinking and design. - Examine the environmental, social, and cultural impacts of material choices and construction methods. - Understand and critically engage with architectural typologies in relation to contemporary human needs. - Develop collaborative and reflective learning practices through research and knowledge exchange. - Develop strong communication and representation skills, using diverse media to express, explore, and convey architectural ideas effectively.

LV-Nr. des Entwurfs 

052-0545-26

Unterrichts-sprache 

English

Arbeitsweise 

Einzel- und Gruppenarbeit, davon 5 oder mehr Wochen Gruppenarbeit

Daten Zwischenkritiken 

Datum Schlusskritik 

15.12 /16.12.2026

Einführungs-veranstaltung 

15.09.2026, 10:00, Studio HIL G60

Zusätzliche Kosten 

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

Verfügbare Plätze 

Nach Bedarf

Plakat des Entwurfs-programmes 

Plakat ansehen (PDF Datei)