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.

Can Paradise and the City co-exist? The Resort as Critical Lens

April 22, 2015

Paper presented by Adrianne Joergensen
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference, Chicago, IL

Abstract: The tropical resort depends on its ability to synthetically produce an ideal paradise for the tourist. While multi-disciplinary literature discusses the impact of tourism on tropical destinations, it only references aspects of the built environment. Through a choreographed set of architectural techniques, the resort emphasizes the favorable characteristics of its natural surroundings, while insulating the tourist from any unsightly elements. Easily achieved in remote tropical settings, the resort’s efforts to maintain an aesthetically ideal paradise are more challenged by an urbanized context.

This paper focuses on resort spaces in the Riau Archipelago—a group of islands surrounding the city-state of Singapore and the Singapore Strait—as examples of tropical idylls resisting the effects of an urbanized region. An outcome of Singapore’s regional ‘borrowed attractiveness’ agenda, the Riau resort reconstructs paradise geography as a respite to Singapore’s hectic urban life. Using Singapore’s air and sea channels, the resort offers locals and international tourists a convenient getaway. And yet, its proximity to one of the world’s most industrialized waterways threatens to undermine its paradise illusion. As a typology that balances urban conveniences with a natural image, the Riau resort presents a critical lens for re-examining the conflicting desires of tourism and industry within urbanized tropical regions.

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Events

Can Paradise and the City co-exist? The Resort as Critical Lens