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.

After Empirical Urbanism – Symposium Toronto

February 28, 2015

After Empirical Urbanism is a three day symposium organized by faculty members of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design: Dean Richard Sommer, Michael Piper, Ultan Byrne, Roberto Damiani and Mauricio Quiros.

Fictions Of The Ordinary (Session)

Tobias Armborst – Vassar College
Marshall Brown – Illinois Institute of Technology
Alex Lehnerer – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
+ Michael Piper – moderator – University of Toronto

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown presented their studies of Las Vegas and Levittown as an effort to “withhold judgement” of the commercially produced American city to identify new potential in a very particular, ordinary, everyday urbanism. Through both their analysis and design proposals, they sought to demonstrate how the architecture of the strip and subdivision could perform as a system of communication: engaging popular sentiment and the new subjectivities produced by the widespread use of the automobile. Proponents of ‘Everyday Urbanism’ have continued to “look at the city”, finding – for example – expressions of public life within the quotidian commercial space of garage sales and street vending in Los Angeles. Incorporating technics from ethnography and other fields of research, these urbanists have opened up a broad spectrum of the built environment to study. Yet, the very choice of which particular as-found conditions to focus on – and their curation for analysis – constitutes a mode of judgment, or a critical lens.

Recently scholars have developed analytical techniques that more explicitly reframe the ordinary through the subjectivity of such lenses. Some urbanists create fictional narratives of existing everyday space, while others locate alternative urban visions within popular media. Amongst practitioners, some have developed design methods that exaggerate the ordinary as a method of invention. For this Panel, we are seeking to present work in this field and to turn a critical eye toward the problems and potentials of accepting fiction as an operative aspect of analysis and story telling as a mode of design. (Text by Michael Piper, University of Toronto)

February 27-28, 2015
230 College St.
Toronto, Canada

Poster

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Events

After Empirical Urbanism – Symposium Toronto