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.

The Medialized Church

FS 2016 Oh' Lord

Sant’Ignazio di Loyola is known for it’s trompe-l’œil frescoes which create the illusion of transcendent 3-dimensional spaces on flat surfaces. Its critique of architectural space was nearly the same as that of Instagram, Pinterest, Jencks, Drexler and Venturi: two-dimensional representation seems to suffice. Additionally, our pre-conceived image of a “church” (or any architecture) is now so strong that even the most impressive spatial experiences can feel routine because we have already seen it (and nearly felt it) before as an image in a book or on our phone.

This project argues that since space is now received much the same way as we experience an image, architecture might instead attempt to recast images as forms in space.

Class info and syllabus.

Project by: Anna Nemeth Lilian Pala

Cast: The Matriarch
Dome

Cast: The head of the Family
Apsis

Cast: The Cousin
Side Chapel

Cast: The Princess
Lantern

Cast: The Mentor
Apsis Column

Cast: The Matchmaker
Facade

Cast: The Antagonist
Transept

Cast: The Children
Nave Windows

Cast: The Canopy
Barrel Vault

Cast: The Siblings
Intersection Columns

Cast: The People
Nave Columns and Arches

The cast of the project derived from interpretations of the different architectural elements in the only existing section of Sant’Ignazio di Loyola in Rome