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.

Framing the Void

The project creates a new plaza for the city of Zurich by placing three public buildings along the borders of the site: a school, a library and a sports hall. In this new setting, the existing silo becomes a silent participant of the ensemble.

In order to overcome the strong industrial influence in the site, it had to be given a new identity. Three distinct plaster facades shape the character of the plaza and overshadow the existing context. Their precise positioning resulting from a close dialogue with the existing infrastructure underlines the generosity of the space that has so far been left unnoticed.

While the buildings are perceived as one entity with the same rough brick facade towards the city, they develop a highly individual character towards the plaza shaped both by the inner functioning of the programs they hold and their respective articulations with the public space. Each entity holds one particular program that punctually comes to manifest itself in the facade and thereby reveals the inner functioning of the building. It is the most public parts of the program that seek the proximity to the public plaza and start shaping the profile of the plaster facade conferring the facades their respective identities.

The spectators’ stands of the sports court become recognizable as windows in the symmetrical façade of the hall and the lockers of the changing rooms present themselves in the ground floor. The mass of the archives of the library is translated by an over dimensioned opening in the facade, and public stairs continue the slope of the hill it sits on. Lastly the clock of the school building marks the presence of the corridor being the main meeting point for the students.

Thereby these seemingly simple planes start to become plastic and allow the plaza to spread inside the building. The threshold between the inside and outside becomes blurred.

Project by: Sophie Piticco

Each building interacts with the plaza on the ground floor

The public parts of the program seek the proximity of the plaza and shape the facades

Section through the plaza

Elevation from Sihlquai

Main entrance situation from Limmatstrasse

The presence of the third building is felt through its cast shadow on the plaza

The brick facades give the ensemble a unified character towards the outside

The heavy archive of the library shapes the facade and a large public stair continues the slope of the hill

The arcade of the long school building makes the link between the plaza and the pedestrian walkway of the east viaduct

The sports hall frames the plaza towards Sihlquai and its lockers present themselves to the plaza

The rough brick wall meets the delicate white plaster façade

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Master thesis

Framing the Void