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.

Singapore Tropicana

There was a critical moment in Singapore’s history when the emerging nation’s architects and intellectuals envisioned ambitious approaches for the future of their city. The perception of a tropical city was infused with varied cultural and ideological tendencies. Architects sought a formal language to account for the people as well as the tropical environment. The ideologies formulated and representational forms were strong and deliberate. While the ambitions were bold and full of promise, soon they were unable to satisfy the demands of the zeitgeist and later became peculiar misfits in Singapore’s grand modernization program.
Today, scattered throughout the city of Singapore we find traces of this era, most often as artifacts awaiting replacement by more potent structures. These traces hold promise for imagining Singapore’s future architectural ambitions.

We will look at this previous era from an architectural point of view by analyzing these early incarnations of the contemporary “Garden City” not through the nostalgia of lost memories, but with the tools of architectural practice. We will utilize our architectural expertise to extract the very essence of these buildings, transforming and projecting them into a concept of a tropical future.

The Singapore Tropicana Studio is a celebration of the tropical city and its inherent atmosphere. Between the hot and the wet, the ambitious and the sensitive, the permeable and the sealed, the cultivated and the wild, each student will be assigned a piece of architecture and infrastructure located in the city that will inform his/her subsequent work. In the first weeks we will conduct multiple tasks to set the foundation for the individual design work. Preliminary work will consist of building specific models based on research of the assigned buildings and finding an appropriate mode of representation for architecture in the tropics today. Looking at the gestures of the buildings will help us find answers to the question of how the building as formal object contributes to the urban fabric, the surrounding atmosphere, and cultural milieu. By reconsidering eccentric features of the architecture through models we will discuss detail and identity. Other important properties in architecture such as formal operations of addition and subtraction, inversion and exaggeration, the ideas of concept and context, as well as how architecture impacts the city and urbanity, will be introduced and thematized throughout the studio.

This studio is a joint project with NUS Department of Architecture.

Downloads

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