Angaben zur Professur

Lehrstuhl 

Gastdozentur T. Barrault / C. Pressacco

Typ 

Gastdozentur Entwurf

Standort 

HIL

Webseite 

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

Assistierende 

Sophie Agne, Mathilde Lesénécal

Kontakt E-Mail 

agne@arch.ethz.ch

Angaben zur Entwurfsklasse

Typ 

Entwurf V-IX

Thema 

WALLNESS

Beschreibung
des Entwurfs-programmes 

WALLNESS Designing inhabitable and comfortable places has always been one of architecture’s fundamental tasks, and recent climatic transformations may be understood as a reminder of this responsibility. The need for comfort places new demands on the building envelope and calls for the invention of passive systems requiring less energy. The studio WALLNESS questions the role and purpose of the wall, both as a symbol and as an architectural element, bringing together all its components in order to intensify the constructive and architectural rationalism that has been at work for several decades. Insulation is now fully part of the repertoire of architectural devices, while the thermal paradigm reveals previously unexplored fields of construction. Transparency is no longer limited to the visible, but extends to the invisible chemical and physical phenomena that pass through breathable materials. WALLNESS considers solidity both as a necessity and as an unprecedented formal potential. Materials are at the heart of this revolution. WALL The wall is certainly one of the great casualties of the twentieth century. Considered an obstacle to the many spatial ambitions of Modernity, it was gradually removed from architectural debates and forms in favour of more transparent materials, better suited to the fantasy of an absolute visual relationship with the environment. The studio WALLNESS seeks to question these choices and to give the wall renewed legitimacy. WALLNESS understands the wall as an element of possibility, as a milieu of interactions, and as the receptacle for new kinds of relationships between interior, exterior and the human body. COMFORT While our bodies possess a capacity to adapt to climatic variations, architecture creates a thermal refuge. It establishes a microclimate that protects us from the more pronounced fluctuations of daily, seasonal, or exceptional conditions. At a time when maintaining stable and homogeneous indoor conditions requires ever more energy to compensate for increasingly frequent and intense extremes, it has become necessary to question our standards and reconsider our understanding of comfort. Rather than seeking to neutralise all variation, WALLNESS will explore the conditions for a more relative, evolving and situated form of comfort, capable of establishing new relationships between body, architecture and climate. Throughout the semester, the form of spaces will therefore be driven by the desire to produce comfortable living conditions and inhabitable interior climates. Being invisible, comfort is felt more than it is seen: temperature, light, humidity, acoustics, touch and air movement engage the body and all its senses. Varying according to seasons, hours and uses, comfort also introduces time at the heart of the project. Insulation, thermal inertia, time lag, ventilation and radiation thus cease to be merely physical phenomena and become architectural materials and determinants of the form of dwelling. The studio will seek to identify the components of comfort, understand their interactions and define the spatial and constructive strategies capable of sustaining them. Surface, thickness, continuity and materiality of the wall will become privileged parameters of the project, engaging phenomena of radiation, diffusion, breathing and exchange within inhabited spaces. Their representation will constitute both a field of prospective research and a genuine design tool, making visible the invisible phenomena that determine our experience of comfort. MILANESE RATIONALISM Milan will be the territory of our typological, formal and climatic investigations. The studio will focus particularly on post-war Milanese Rationalism, both as a local culture deeply embedded in the forms and history of the city, and, more importantly, as a method of design. The aim will not be to reproduce its figures, but to understand its underlying logic: its capacity to produce precise forms from given conditions. The studio will seek to extend and displace this tradition by confronting it with contemporary challenges. Climate, comfort, insulation and energy will not be considered external constraints imposed upon architecture, but as the possible foundations of a new Milanese rationality. These new conditions should in turn generate forms, types and spaces capable of entering into dialogue with the images, concepts and architectures that have shaped the city’s architectural culture for several decades. DUSTY ROSSI The entire studio will focus on a common site: Aldo Rossi’s project for San Cristoforo railway station, abandoned in 1991. This unfinished architecture constitutes a double inheritance, both physical and theoretical: a concrete structure to be transformed as much as a structure of thought to be critically examined. The studio will engage with Rossi’s thinking, particularly his ability to monumentalise urban facts by transforming them into forms and signs. Can the forms Rossi originally envisioned to give shape and meaning to this mute concrete framework find new relevance today? Are they still operative? Do the robust, passive construction systems demanded by climate and comfort necessarily produce their own architectural language, or can they instead extend and renew Rossi’s architectural rationality? In other words, can new reasons produce, or legitimise, forms that are already there? COLLECTIVE REFUGE The definitions of the word refuge are multiple. In its strictest sense, it refers to a shelter: a safe place offering protection from immediate or potential danger, or from extreme conditions. More broadly, it refers to a place of destination, comfort and well-being, offering both an escape from difficult situations and a path towards serenity. The existing structure, an objet trouvé, will be transformed through collective housing projects. Types, shared, private and intimate spaces, circulation systems and relationships with the city will be reconsidered in response to the new climatic and energetic conditions architecture must address. These conditions offer an opportunity to question the very foundations of the discipline, and housing constitutes a privileged laboratory for doing so. Taking the individual body’s sensitivity as a point of departure, the projects will move towards the collective through processes of repetition, from the one to the many. INSULATION Insulation is not merely a technical constraint: it constitutes a field of typological, constructive, cultural and disciplinary investigation. Beyond its immediate thermal performance, insulation questions the nature and role of the building envelope, both in terms of the conditions it produces within interior spaces and the forms it presents to the city and the urban landscape. It therefore invites us to reinvent the contemporary relevance of the wall, questioning, in particular, the primacy of its structural role. The collective housing projects will pay particular attention to surface, thickness, continuity and materiality, the primary corollaries of an architecture that gives renewed importance to the wall, considering them as major determinants of spatial form and quality. Lime-hemp composite will be privileged, extending the research initiated during the Fall Semester 2025, which will be presented and made available to the studio. Drawing also on the writings of Victor Olgyay (Design with Climate, 1963) and Lisa Heschong (Thermal Delight in Architecture, 1979), WALLNESS will seek to identify the rational principles capable of turning comfort into a genuine design tool. Climate, matter and energy can then become the reasons for new forms, new types and new ways of living, allowing us to imagine fictions of collective dwelling within the structure inherited from Aldo Rossi. BLUR Modernity led to the dematerialisation of the wall, and even to its complete abandonment. Today, the challenge is to introduce an intermediary condition: a solid no longer defined solely by its modes of construction, geometric measurement, or mechanical and thermal performance, but increasingly by the phenomena that pass through it. This implies moving from a Cartesian regime in which reason prevails over the senses towards a more sensitive and sensorial architecture: from a measured, calculated, stable and homogeneous apprehension of the world towards one that is uncertain, fluctuating and contrasted — in a sense, from reason towards sensation. The variability of natural materials introduces a form of blur, related to the irreducible inexactness of their constitution. The hygroscopic phenomena at work within lime-hemp insulation continuously alter its chemical composition. Thermal and hygrometric boundaries shift within and around the wall, in an uninterrupted continuity whose contours remain perpetually blurred. To think of the “blur of the wall” is therefore to shift our attention away from its visible and physical boundaries towards the invisible hygrothermal phenomena that pass through it.

Thematische und methodische Schwerpunkte 

Entwurf, Konstruktion, Handwerk

Lernziele 

CRITICAL POSITION The studio considers architecture as a discipline in continuous transformation, constructed through the relationships it establishes between its past, present and future. Contemporary concerns neither replace previous ones nor remain immutable: they shift, put existing principles to the test and compel us to reconsider some of the discipline’s foundations. Climate, energy, resources and comfort are therefore not peripheral subjects, but new conditions from which architecture can be conceived. Projects will be expected to construct a critical position grounded in architectural theory, capable of confronting its forms, types and rationalities with the transformations of the contemporary world. CONSTRUCTION Building is an act of creation. Materials, thicknesses, assemblies, methods of implementation and resources will not be considered as the technical resolution of a previously defined form, but as its determinants. Construction simultaneously engages architectural, economic and environmental questions and must therefore be addressed through precise positions. Projects will seek to establish a direct relationship between economy of means, constructive intelligence and architectural expression. DWELLING Housing constitutes one of architecture’s fundamental laboratories. Because it engages the most ordinary and intimate gestures of everyday life, it directly connects body, space, climate and society. Projects will question contemporary forms of collective living and consider comfort not as an accumulation of equipment or the homogenisation of interior conditions, but as a genuine architectural material — robust and enduring. Types, circulation systems, thresholds, rooms, shared spaces and degrees of intimacy will be expected to embody explicit social, political and environmental positions. REPRESENTATION Without representation, a project remains mute. Drawing does not merely describe architecture; it constructs the instruments through which architecture can be conceived, discussed and made intelligible. Each project will therefore develop a strategy of representation inseparable from its design approach. Alongside conventional and necessary tools (plans, sections, elevations and details) projects will develop modes of representation capable of making less visible phenomena perceptible: thickness, matter, temperature, energy, time, atmosphere and comfort. Representation thus becomes, in itself, a territory for architectural experimentation.

LV-Nr. des Entwurfs 

052-1181-26

Unterrichts-sprache 

Englisch

Arbeitsweise 

Nur Gruppenarbeit

Daten Zwischenkritiken 

18. November

Datum Schlusskritik 

16. December

Einführungs-veranstaltung 

15. September, 10:00 - HIL C 15D

Zusätzliche Kosten 

CHF 250 (Schätzung, ohne allfällige Kosten für Modellbau und Seminarwoche)

Verfügbare Plätze 

26

Plakat des Entwurfs-programmes 

Plakat ansehen (PDF Datei)