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.

Sentosa—Singapore

— The Model and the Modeled

How can we locate an architectural idea within the bigger scale of the city of Singapore? We follow the discussions about Singapore being a model for Asia’s future development. Somehow, perhaps because models are literally a very architectural concept, the critical issue became the model itself. But the question is not so much, “What kind of model is Singapore?” but “What is the model for Singapore?” And of course: it is Sentosa! The little fantasy island at the southern tip of Singapore. Just look at the development of both from 1942 to 2012. It is just about the same!

So if we want to know more about the future of Singapore, we just have to carefully look at the map of Sentosa. It is much more than a hysterical Coney Island. This is in fact the very Simulation Platform of Singapore.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every city had such a mini version of itself in order to conduct urban experiments?

Similarities of Singapore's and Sentosa's development over the past 70 years. Not in scale.

Map of Sentosa's attractions.

First attempt to differentiate Singapore accordingly at a bigger scale.

... with four distinct character zones.

Reference: Swissminiatur, CH.

Image credits: Tim Rieniets

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Research projects

Sentosa—Singapore