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.

Seminar week HS 15: Footnotes From Central Java

October 19, 2015

Joint Seminar Week with Prof. Philip Ursprung and Prof. Alex Lehnerer

What does travel mean for architects? How does travel change our perception? How can we link seemingly discontinuous phenomena, and how can we tie together issues of architecture, urbanisms, economy, landscape, history and future? These questions do not only motivate our seminar weeks, they are also posed by a research and exhibition project, launched under the Title “The Tourist: Footnotes from Java” in the frame of Future Cities Lab 2 in Singapore by Alexander Lehnerer and Philip Ursprung. Our joint seminar week is closely related to this project. It will start in Singapore, lead us to Java, Indonesia, and back to Singapore. Sites include the little known harbor city of Semarang, the Dieng Plateau, and the booming cultural scene of Jogjakarta. We will climb the Merapi, an active volcano, follow the paths of a cigarette from the manufacture to the tobacco fields, meet with activists, pick up a 500 kg model of Merapi, visit temples and experience the complex intersection of urban and agricultural structures.

Participants must be physically fit for a strenuous nightly hike up Mount Merapi. (Four to five hours up, four hours down, departure at 1 a.m). Hiking boots, warm clothes, a rucksack and headlight or torch are necessary.

Participants: Max. 11 Students

Costs: Category E, Max. CHF 1’500 (flight, hotel, entrance fees)

Introductory Meeting: 8.10.2005, 10:00, location to be announced

Important Infos: http://www.ursprung.arch.ethz.ch/seminarwochen/footnotes-from-central-java

Part of the research project “The Tourist”.

Downloads

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Chicken Church, Java