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.

Vergegenwärtigung – Symposium

March 10, 2014

In May 2014, Alex Lehnerer, Savvas Ciriacidis, and Sandra Oehy organized a symposium in the Kanzlerbungalow [Chancellor Bungalow] in Bonn together with Philip Ursprung from ETH Zurich and the Wüstenrot Foundation. Inspired by the atmosphere of the real site, experts from various backgrounds examined diverse aspects surrounding the meaning, symbolism, design, perception, and use of the Kanzlerbungalow—in the past, present, and future. These talks have been collected in a publication and supplemented by articles and responses in an ongoing, in-depth discussion of the questions raised by the BUNGALOW GERMANIA exhibition in Venice.

The Kanzlerbungalow in Bonn was restored from 2006 to 2009 as part of the Wüstenrot Foundation’s historic preservation program. This restoration was intended to convert the Bungalow into a young historical site that can be visited and experienced. The Kanzlerbungalow’s future will also depend on the ways in which architecture can become manifest in the intersection of past and future. The significant role that the building plays in the exhibition demonstrates how much we can still learn from its architecture and history. The Wüstenrot Foundation is pleased to contribute to this project with a publication.

Participants:
Olaf Asendorf, Wolfgang Bachmann, Ursula Baus, Sally Below, Elisabeth Bronfen, Berthold Burkhardt, Savvas Ciriacidis, Martha Doehler-Behzadi, Werner Durth, Uwe Karsten Heye, Hans Walter Hütter, Judith Koppetsch, Stefan Krämer, Nikolaus Kuhnert, Philip Kurz, Alex Lehnerer, Michael Marten, Irene Meissner, Anh-Linh Ngo, Juliane Rebentisch, Stephan Trüby, Lars Ch. Uhlig, Philip Ursprung, Silke Wenk, Karin Wilhelm.

(ltr) Stephan Trueby, Alex Lehnerer, Juliane Rebentisch

Philip Ursprung

Uwe Karsten Heye

(ltr) Uwe Karsten Heye, Elisabeth Bronfen, Werner Durth

(ltr) Judith Koppetsch, Savvas Ciriacidis, Stephan Trueby

All

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Events

Vergegenwärtigung – Symposium