Hortus hybridus domestique. Un jardin pour les étudiants d'architecture de l'EPFL

«L'imagination ce n'est pas la création, mais l'intensification des choses existantes». [Hohl, Ludwig] ; Ce projet part du postulat que nos sociétés occidentales traversent actuellement une crise complexe aux tenants et aboutissants sociaux, économiques et écologiques. L'architecte, de part l'impact de ses choix architecturaux sur l'environnement spatial et social, possède la formidable opportunité d'inciser dans la réalité, de soulever le débat et de mettre en mouvement des dynamiques nouvelles. L'hortus hybridus est un jardin hybride qui a été identifié comme possédant le potentiel d'amorcer une réflexion autour de champs aussi divers que la re-création de liens sociaux, la recherche de qualité spatiale au sein de l'espace public, le retour à une culture vivrière et la nécessité de transformer nos modes de vie afin de les adapter à la recherche d'un équilibre écologique. L'installation d'un système d'hortus hybridus au sein de l'EPFL est vue comme une occasion de tester la capacité du jardin à transformer le visage du campus et soulève la question de la qualité de ses espaces extérieurs. S'appuyant sur une observation précise du site qui permet, comme l'énonce Georges Descombes «de trouver les justes motifs d'une intervention», ce projet d'hortus hybridus domestique pour les étudiants d'architecture s'attache à «intensifier certains éléments existants du site» afin de ré-activer des liens entre différents éléments spatiaux et sociaux et de faire revenir à la surface un potentiel oublié, mais latent.

Architecture without Content 6: Without Venturi

Kersten Geers

Robert Venturi is probably architecture's best-known hero for the wrong reason. Extremely successful at a young age as the iconoclast of North America's late modernism, he soon came to represent (through his collaboration with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izneour) a specific kind of sociology turned into one-dimensional architecture, forever incarnated in Learning from Las Vegas. The gargantuan success of his second publication somehow dwarfed the monumental achievements of his first (and far more funny) book: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Ever devoured by generations as obligatory literature in their education, the reading of this treatise has always been somehow biased by what came afterwards. In many ways the facts of history are always more nuanced and complicated then simple slogans can assess. Still we feel it is important to reactivate again the grammar, vocabulary, methods and insights that are so beautifully presented to us in his seminal work. Taking Venturi's work as a method however, would account for a gigantic mistake, as it would not be truthful to the very core of his practice: to suggest without claiming, and to claim without consequence (something he sadly forgot in later times). For that reason this Venturi studio in Tokyo is (and was) 'Without Venturi'. In an attempt to take his work afresh, we should not theorise it too much, we should appropriate it with a certain naiveté. The workshop we organised did exactly that: take a Venturi project, appropriate it, transform it, replace it. This simple method of dumb transformation allowed us to think about language and principles, without the bias of interpretation. The interpretation came later. 'Without Venturi' came about because Yoshi Tsukamoto invited us to do a workshop at Tokyo Tech, an invitation we took with much pleasure and engagement. From the very beginning, it was clear to us that the Tokyo of Bow Wow, Sakamoto and Shinohara was the perfect spot to investigate the rather naive hunch on Venturi we caress for some time now. Perhaps the work of these three architects is the best example of the possible success of false interpretation, appropriation and indirect inspiration. In a conversation we had the luck to have with Sakamoto-sensei, he confessed of being at a certain point, very inspired by the 'images' and the 'image sequence' of the Complexity book. Untranslated and to a certain extent, obscure, the visual poetry and probably the visual argument found its way into the very idiosyncratic and beautiful work of the Japanese master. Without Venturi is for that reason very much tribute to this work, to architects that took formal risks more or less inspired by it, or more often just out of the blue. We feel this is the fundamental lesson of Venturi's legacy, as it brings us back to a radical method of formal accumulation that does not fall short because of its ideological bandwidth, but is able to embrace the complexity of the world without sacrificing its own inner consistency

2014

Conduit, Patio, Waste: Mapping Environmental Relations in Bairro da Malagueira

Bárbara Maçães E Costa

The ongoing ecological crisis is reframing the common binary opposition between architecture and nature and provoking us to ask what kinds of buildings we collectively want to create for the ecosystems that we inhabit. The environment is not a neutral background, a natural scenery, or a container of pre-social resources; and architecture is not a collection of objects floating in a vacuum. Buildings and landscapes constitute each other dialectically. The environmental question in Western architecture had a peak moment during the contextualism debates of the 1950s and 60s, in the UK and Italy. They equated context with ideas such as ecological urbanism and habitat, or preesistenze ambientali and continuita . But by the 1970âs there was a shift from a sort of socio-biological determinism towards a more culturalist approach. Context became synonymous with historical context, and site-specificity was to be achieved less through a dialectical interplay with material reality than through a referential, typo-morphological approach. Gradually, a rift emerged: ecology became a matter of natural fact to be technologically calculated, and context became a matter of cultural identity to be narrated and deconstructed. From this point onwards, and in tandem with the rise of neoliberal commodification and its correlate ideology of postmodernism, Western architecture lost the ability to tackle the environmental question beyond the narrow scope of the individual architectural object. Before this split, the modernist tradition had attempted to address the built environment, and housing projects in particular, as a socio-ecological totality. Backed by large-scale funding initiatives from social-democratic states, human and non-human life could be understood dialectically, with the neighbourhood scale functioning as a mediating unit between the individual and the social. Alvaro Siza's Bairro da Malagueira was one of the last projects of this generation. It emerged from the very particular conditions of the 1974/75 Carnation Revolution and the state-sponsored housing program SAAL, a dual power structure made up of construction technical brigades and neighbourhood committees. During this process, the SAAL-Norte produced a series of projects focused on reinventing the typology of the ilha, and Alvaro Siza wrote a text considering the hypothesis of the proletarian island as basic element of the urban tissue. What was taken from these islands was less their stylistic or typological configuration than the system of environmental relations that they fostered, predicated on a series of threshold spaces and open interiorities. From Bairro da Malagueira, this thesis proposes a method for mapping environmental relations in architecture. It does so by identifying a series of thresholds, namely the conduit, the patio, and the waste, understood as structures that convert space into bounded associations, mediating between inside and outside, foreground and background, architecture and nature. Each threshold acts as a time-space frame with a specific magnitude of approximation, and each internalizes sets of social relations, such as class, gender and race, with corresponding modes of environmental production, namely the hidden backgrounds of territory, domesticity, and wilderness. Bairro da Malagueira hence becomes a template through which this thesis explores a dialectical understanding of architecture as an agent of environmental history.

EPFL2021

An Archive of Projects on Typology in Architecture 2013-2018

Antje Bittorf, Anja Fröhlich, Martin Fröhlich, Sebastian Lippok, Tiago André Pratas Borges

Learning to construct is the objective of the architecture student, who seeks to bring sketches, sophisticated visualizations, material and component choices, and detailed plans and diagrams together in a single grand composition. Plans and Images offers insight into how architects are trained by examining the teaching and research approach of the Laboratory of Elementary Architecture and Studies of Types (EAST), of the EPFL School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). Going beyond the traditional notion of functionally determined typologies, Laboratory EAST is concerned more broadly with the principles of typology in architecture. Richly illustrated with drawings and plans by Laboratory EAST’s students, the book also includes essays by Antje Bittorf, Tiago P. Borges, Anja Fröhlich, Martin Fröhlich, Rafael Moneo, and Marie Theres Stauffer. An interview with Rafael Moneo, discussing the research topics pursued at Laboratory EAST, and a photo essay by Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti round out the book