Building Cultures Valparaiso: pedagogy practice and poetry at the Valparaiso School of Architecture and Design

"'Building Cultures Valparaiso" investigates the radical approach to teaching and making at the School of Architecture and Design in Valparaiso, Chile. With newly commissioned essays from, among other, Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio Gonzalez Galán and Gerald Wildgruber and a collection of meticulously reproduced drawings from the school's archives, 'Building Cultures Valparaiso' is a resource for scholars and practicioners interested in alternative visions of architecture." "In August of 2014, students from three Swiss schools of architecture traveled to Chile where they joined colleagues from the Valparaiso School to initiate the construction of the 'Pórtico de los Huéspedes' in the Open City. The 'Pórtico de los Huéspedes' will house a research center and administrative offices as well as an assembly space for the collected students and faculty of the Valparaiso School. Over a three week period, students surveyed an area designated for the project and determined a site, tested and elaborated details through drawing, models, and 1:1 fabrication, and began the construction of the wooden frame of the project. The resulting structure - whose volume is based on Erik Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Chapel project form 1918-1929 - wil be continued, revised and amended over the course of the next four years."

Sustainable Architecture for Educational Space in Africa and China

Ning Liu

Countries in the Global South are producing the most important educational needs of the 21st century. Fast-growing cities can provide the most striking examples of these current tendencies. Just over a decade after the start of the new millennium, the needs for quality-education and appropriate learning space are huge. Yet they are still largely underestimated in many countries of the Global South. With high-level demographical growth and fast-expanding urban boundaries, the developing metropolis provides a fascinating place to analyze societal mutations. School â as one of the fundamental institutions in modern society â deserves timely observation and careful analysis. The research work is dedicated to the study of educational architecture in two African cities Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and Cape Town (South Africa) and one Chinese city: Hangzhou. Because of the fundamental relationship between school and society, learning places need to make statement of their urban positions. The hypothesis proposes to question the concept of sustainability in the framework of cultural-environmental qualities between school and city, between users and space. Conducted by an architect, this thesis is the synthesis of a research process together with the professional practice. It is benchmarked by a path of three steps: critical analysis of literature, in situ case-study and cross-cultural comparison with proposal of an assessment method that opens up for future perspectives. The thesis argues that the current time is crucial for our society to reconsider the place of educational architecture in the city. A truly sustainable architecture is transformable in the time-span of its usage and transformative in the changing urban environment. With a discursive comparative view between built cases located in these three cities, this work attempts to provide new insights on the design of the learning space in the urban future. The synthesis provides a panel of cultural-environmental quality profiles as guidelines to future design innovation opportunities.

EPFL2015

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

Parkbooks2019

Sustainable Architecture for Educational Space in Africa and China

Ning Liu

EPFL2015