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.

Richtfest Cabaret Voltaire—Zunfthaus

June 06, 2016

Please see info on ongoing programme and performances.

“Wenn einmal im Jahr die Mitglieder der Leinenweberzunft im “Zunfthaus zur Waag” zum festlichen Bankett zusammenkommen, tafeln im Zunftsaal nur die Männer. Die Ehefrauen der Zünfter sitzen in einem anderen Geschoß, verrät der Waag-Wirt. Und auch die Weiberleut’ im Service dürfen dann nur zum Bringen der Speisen hinein. Exklusiv und männerbündlerisch, das sind die Zürcher Zünfte bis heute.
“Du darfst da nicht rein”: Das elitäre Prinzip Zunft, das noch immer die fleißige, traditionsbewusste Stadt bestimmt, führt jetzt ausgerechnet eine neue vor. Für die 100 Tage der Manifesta hat die 27. Zürcher Zunft das Cabaret Voltaire gekapert, hat aus dem nur wenige Meter von den alten Zunfthäusern an der Limmat entfernten Dada-Geburtsort das “Zunfthaus Voltaire” gemacht. Einer von jenen im Toga-artigen Umhang zu werden ist allerdings schwer: Zunftwillige müssen mit ihrer Performance – und zwar gemeinsam mit einem Künstler – überzeugen. Sehr subtil wird hier am konservativen Traditionslack der Stadt gekratzt.”
(Anne Katrin Fessler für Der Standard, 13.Juni 2016)

The Erker at Spiegelgasse