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.

Singapore Tropicana*

In the early 1970s there was a crucial moment when the future of the island’s city wasn’t conceived of as a unitary technocratic design agenda. Different cultural and ideological tendencies influenced the young nation and thus the architects and urban planners and their perception of the tropical city. While some of these architects’ ideas were manifested in built works, most evidence of their ambitions, however, has vanished along with the desire to steer the city’s future according to alternative agendas. A few scattered witnesses from this time remain in the city today, but for most of these artifacts their moment has passed. Unable to satisfy the demands of the zeitgeist, which condemns architecture to solve the globe’s problems, they have seemingly lost their purpose.

Because architecture’s raison d’être is not to solve problems, however, we reject the contemporary tendency to proclaim that everything is architecture and architecture is nothing. Instead, in our alternative vision of Singapore, we consult the outlaws of the contemporary “Garden City” to conceive of a tropical future. By examining the purposeless buildings of today, we invigorate the island’s architecture for a viable future on the edge of the hot and the wet, the ambitious and the sensitive, the permeable and the sealed, and the cultivated and the wild.

* The term “Tropicana” relates to two magic historical moments. The first one is the opening of the Tropicana Las Vegas hotel and casino in 1957. And the second one is the founding of Tropicana Products in Florida in 1947, a company specialized in the production of orange juice. Each of them helped to squeeze the notion of the “tropical” into a lifestyle product that no longer required the actual tropics as a context. The essence of the tropics becomes transferable and even flourishes at a relative humidity well below 30%.

The project Singapore Tropicana will be accompanied by a research/design studio in spring 2013 by Plans & Politics in collaboration with Jörg Rekitkke and Erik L’Heureux from the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS).