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.

Melancholia, seminar week FS 2017

March 20, 2017

Licht- und Schattenbilder from Inner Europe

ETH Zürich D-ARCH, Joint Seminar Week, 20-24 March 2017
Prof. Dr. Alexander Lehnerer and Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung

Melancholia, a term known since Antiquity, defines a state of sadness, introversion, reflection, aimless inactivity and pause. Since the Renaissance, melancholia is considered a precondition of creativity. On our seminar week we will use the notion of melancholia to describe our attitude towards the architecture realized between the late 1990s and the early millennium in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. What embodied the future and served as a point of reference for architectural discourse is now turning into a recent past, hovering between the contemporary and the historical.

The state of melancholia also applies to the current situation of Europe. The optimism of the 1990s has given way to uncertainty and concern. Former seminar weeks have lead us to the outer borders of the European Union, to Skopje, Marseille, and the Bialowieza forest in Eastern Poland. Now we want to encounter Europe’s center. Nowhere else has the dream of a united Europe, the environment of the welfare state and architecture converged more fruitfully than in the BeNeLux area between the 1990s and the early millennium. How can we make fruitful the term of melancholia as a concept of architectural theory? How can we link historiography with the description of buildings? Does the design of Europe manifest itself in the moment of its partial dismantling? Our journey will lead from Zurich to Colmar, Strasbourg, Luxemburg, the Ardennes, Lille, Dunkirk, and eventually to Holland, along a line that both separated united Europe over the last centuries. In our pocket we will have Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s book Licht- und Schattenbilder aus dem Innern von Java (1854), a critique of Dutch colonialism. Our trip will end in Leiden where Junghuhn who guided us in the seminar weeks to Java and the Harz, passed seven melancholic yet also highly productive years, writing almost his entire scholarly oeuvre.

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Poster

Mail trolley, European Parliament, Strasbourg

ETH Zürich

The City as the Critical Project of Architecture

Seminar week

Melancholia, seminar week FS 2017