ETH Zürich

Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design
Prof. Dr. Alexander Lehnerer
Department of Architecture
HIL G 74
Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5
8093 Zurich, Switzerland

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Ever since architecture discovered the city as its domain, there has been a critical and fruitful debate regarding how these two relate to one another. One is clearly always part of the other, is comprised by the other, sometimes contained in the other. At least the city and architecture always condition one another. The city is the one big project of society and therefore naturally challenges architecture as a cultural project. The productive and intellectual impetus of the inconclusive negotiation between the two lies exactly in the confrontation of the individual with the collective, text with context, the political with the planned, and the autonomous with the cultural. These dialectical moments of inquiry outline what the discipline of architecture has described as a third typology, an architectural project that operates between two seemingly contradictory states creating friction that leads to alternative and subversive outcomes.

This search for a third typology has led us to investigate collective form and its physicality as a result of historical and contemporary processes, as well as projective/speculative conception—at a scale larger than a building and smaller than a city. The methodological analysis of collective form includes comparative observations, critical commentary, and the search for strategic tools that can be employed to simultaneously shape and understand our built environment in order to produce specific public qualities as cumulative effects. The results are thematic formats that can be read as critical discursive urban projects, both as research and pedagogy, but never obliged to only one single scale.

In this third typology, between the big and the small, theory and project, sign and object, the speculative reality of architecture develops its truly striking potential.

The individual research projects are conducted within three disciplinary modes of inquiry: the history of architecture, the mediums in which architecture communicates, and architecture’s disciplinary versus cultural concerns. Within this research framework, the chair searches for examples, narratives, rationales, and manifestos of how architecture is both a product of as well as an influential force behind the form and culture of the world’s infinite anthropogenic fabric.

L’enfant éternel

The return of architectural education to the center of Zürich means a new visibility and new possibilities of exchange with the most complex and rich case study for any architect: the city. Following this idea, the project proposes to transform existing buildings surrounding the site into the school of architecture. By doing so it also gives back more housing to the city in the Kaserne and police buildings. The school, situated on the first floor of each building, becomes the vertical threshold between the ground floor, mainly commercial and public, and the flats above. The different units are brought together by the Avenue. This Avenue is the main continuous circulation connecting all the domestic and intimate spaces of workshops and studios. It is a space of exchange and encounters dilating itself to accommodate critic and exhibition spaces. Additionally, it offers a covered space for the city underneath and terraces for the housing above allowing them to be the witnesses and actors of the precious central void.

By its implantation the school emphasizes on the peculiar character of Kasernenareal. Indeed this particular plot of Zürich has always been the space of freedom, expression, wishes and dreams, yet nothing permanent has ever happened to it since its construction. Therefore the school works also as a clear horizontal threshold allowing another world to exist independently from the rest of the city. Its central void is articulated by six distinct objects who are crossing path on this site. It is a world of imagination and fantasy, a playful arena of experimentation where the struggles of the architecture student can find an expression.

The Screamer
The conscience is that still small voice that people won’t listen to.
Carlo Collodi

The Runway
It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others.
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The Witness
For, you see, so many things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
Louis Carroll

The Crossover
Le blanc est la couleur des enfants qui meurent.
Philippe Forest

The Prison
Every morning she stood before it, looked at herself, and said: « Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is the fairest of all? ».
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

The Loophole
The moment you doubt wether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.
J. M. Barrie

Project by: Jonas Meylan