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 Tropicondo

The question of how to house very large numbers of low/middle class people on a very small island has received a great deal of critical attention in Singapore. The successes and shortcomings of publicly-funded HDB housing are well documented; but, what about the corollary question: Where and how do rich people live when there simply isn’t enough land for every CEO to be housed in a bungalow?

In this walfach, we will look to the 1980s in Singapore, a time when architects first began to answer the question of how the rich might aggregate on this small island. We will focus specifically on the typology of the low/mid-rise condominum complex. Whereas the luxury condo is now ubiquitous in Singapore, these condo compounds of the 80s represent some of the first proposals for an architecture of collective luxury and leisure.

Our aim is to recapture the initial architectural ambitions of the the condo in Singapore. The full gamut of architectural analysis is open to allow us to understand each project. But we will analyze only insofar as it allows us to projectively theorize each project; that is, to distill each project into a concise visual and textual narrative that allows us to rediscover/reimagine the potential of the condo in Singapore.

Students as prospective buyers.

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Design studio

Design studio

Singapore Tropicondo