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.

Grand Urban Rules

Grand Urban Rules is a tribute to the city’s will to form, manifest in its vast number of steering regimes. The book contains a total of 115 significant ingredients for the Grand Project of our contemporary metropolis. Not always positive but always powerful, these rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. We read cities by their rules! Rules link the physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones. Thereby and almost unnoticed, they have become design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools offers a valuable (urban) design attitude – departing from an approach that wants to control everything, and moving towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

010 Publishers, Rotterdam
Graphic Design by Studio Joost Grootens
Made possible by the Netherlands Architecture Fund.

2nd Edition published December 2013.

Winner of the Urban Design Group Book Award, 2010.

Some Press—

The substantive chapters provide a lively, detailed and sometimes amusing history of zoning in the US. The book does us the great service of drawing to our attention the apparatus of rules, that invisible armature around which our cities are spun, which has rarely been the subject of such a wide-ranging examination.
(Matthew Hardy in RIBA Journal, February 2010)

Grand Urban Rules är en mycket slagkraftig bok, inte minst gäller detta de 115 kortfattade stadsbyggnadsregler som formuleras i bokens inledande kapitel.
(Johan Janssen in Arkitektur #3, 2010)

Geeft op een leesbare en onderhoudende manier inzicht in hoe regelgeving een antwoord kan geven op stedenbouwkundige vraagstukken.
(Vitale stad, February 2010)

Uitermate actueel.
(Architectenweb Magazine, #32, March 2010)

De casestudy’s bewijzen dat het boek hoe dan ook een onmisbaar naslagwerk voor elke stedenbouwkundige is.
(Robert-Jan de Kort at Archined.nl, 7th January 2010)

To sum up, this is a brilliant read and a book that could lead a new and much more open debate around the implications and possibilities of identity of place.
(Urbantick, March 2010)

This book does something to redress the balance, looking at rules as products of human culture and as conduits of beauty and creativity. And it’s not the dry experience you might expect.
(William Wiles, iconeye, April 2010)

Grand Urban Rules succeeds in being educational, interesting and entertaining.
(Marc Furnival, Urban Design, Issue 116, Autumn 2010)

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Selected publications

Grand Urban Rules