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.

17 Volcanoes at CCA, Montreal

September 29, 2016

We are very happy to announce that our joint-research project with Philip Ursprung will travel to Montreal this fall.

From 29 September 2016 to 8 January 2017
at CCA’s Octogonal gallery,

Monday to Friday, 9 am to 4pm

Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920, rue Baile
Montréal, Québec
H3H 2S6
Canada

The CCA presents the exhibition17 Volcanoes: works by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, Armin Linke and Bas Princen, curated by Alex Lehnerer and Philip Ursprung.

In disseminating critical discourse and in alignment with its curatorial practice, the CCA collaborated with the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) offering an unusual architectural scrutiny of transformation of contemporary landscapes.

17 Volcanoes revisits the explorations by German-Dutch explorer Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn who made several expeditions in Java in the service of the Dutch colonial authorities between 1836 and 1848. He was among the first colonists to climb the island’s many volcanoes. His legacy in the realm of cartography, botany, geology and writing can be compared to the role of Thomas Stamford Raffles, Alfred Russel Wallace or Alexander von Humboldt.

Exploring seventeen of his favourite Javanese volcanoes, the project sheds light on Junghuhn as an imaginary guide and as an exemplary figure in order to find out more about the relation between tourism, travel, research, and about the way sites have been transformed into sights and tourist attractions. These volcanoes mark territories that allow US to interweave historical and contemporary narratives of Indonesia. As politically, economically, and culturally charged objects that behave in periodic cycles, these volcanoes are neither urban nor rural, neither alive nor dead, neither past nor present, and neither good nor bad.

The exhibition presents some of Junghuhn’s scientific and artistic works, namely books, lithographs and maps, in conjunction with works of art by the photographer Bas Princen and the photographer and video artist Armin Linke. It also features two sculptures made out of volcanic stone by a stone carver in Magelang, Java, one representing the Mount Merapi, the other the so-called Chicken Church built in 1990 near Merapi. Princen and Linke, joined the expeditions to Java, together with experts such as the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer and the literary historian and author Elisabeth Bronfen.

The exhibition is part of a research project at Future Cities Laboratory at Singapore ETH Centre in Singapore.

THE ARTISTS

Armin Linke is a photographer and filmmaker based in Milan and Berlin. Linke combines a range of contemporary image-processing technologies in order to blur the borders between fiction and reality. Through work with his own archive, as well as with other historical archives, Linke challenges the conventions of photographic practice, whereby the questions of how photography is installed and displayed become increasingly important. He is currently professor at the HfG Karlsruhe.

Bas Princen is an artist who lives and works in Rotterdam. He studied Design for Public Space at the Design academy in Eindhoven, and Architecture at the postgraduate Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. In 2004 he was awarded the Charlotte Köhler Prize, and in 2010 he won the Silver Lion, together with Office KGDVS, at the Venice Biennale. His work has been shown in the main exhibitions of both the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale (Urban as Nature, curated by Dirk Symons) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (Fundamentals, curated by Rem Koolhaas). At the CCA, Princen is currently one of the researchers in a multidisciplinary research program “Architecture and/for Photography” developed by the CCA and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

On Thursday 29 September at 6 pm, a public lecture by the curators Alex Lehnerer and Philip Ursprung will mark the exhibition opening and take place in the Paul Desmarais Theatre.
(Presentation in English, free admission).

On Saturday 15 October at 3 pm, the artist Bas Princen will give a talk on 17 Volcanoes (Presentation in English, free admission).

Kawah Ijen, Photograph by Armin Linke, 2016

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Events

17 Volcanoes at CCA, Montreal